THE MFA'S DENUDED LOGO

About a year ago the folks in charge at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston changed their logo. It used to be this:

Now it looks like this:

This trend isn’t new, but I can’t give it safe harbor.

Erik Spiekermann, a luminary in the world of type, damned the same sin talked in the Johnson and Johnson rebrand:

“I’m so fed up with marketing people running projects without acknowledging that we designers might have an idea or two about what communicates and what doesn’t. They’ve been told by tech guys and lazy designers that things have to be simplified to work on screens. This is knowledge from the 90s and not true anymore. Risk and guts have been replaced by bullshit “narratives” invented by people who’ve never taken a risk in their lives.

This is the blandification of our world, where fun has to be taken out of the equation because it cannot be quantified. No consumer cares about a company’s internal reorganization, they want to like a brand. When all brands are beige, the beigest one will not win but will be forgotten.

The enshittification of our world is run by people who read spreadsheets in bed and look at their smartphones to tell the weather instead of sticking their heads out of the window.

Sometimes I’m glad I’m old and don’t have to take orders from gutless employed managers anymore. My best clients were those I could argue with. It wasn’t about winning or being right, it was about doing the best work.

Thank you Audi, Deutsche Bahn, BVG, Bosch, Ottobock, The Economist…

Their stated aim was to make the MFA more accessible. They believed that the neoclassical architecture and old-style font made the space intimidating to people who didn’t hold those things to be part of their culture and that it was out of tune with the increasing diversity of their collection and programs.

That’s the real trend here: change. Sans is so tempting because it hardly means anything and so designers will tell you it’s a blank canvas you can imbue with whatever values you want. If those values change, you don’t have to tear down your whole brand identity; just tell a new story, build a new ’narrative'.

That’s deeply appealing for firms in an ever-changing tech world, and honestly who cares what an ad company does with their logo? What’s sad is seeing cultural institutions take the same defensive, sterile approach. A logo change is ok, but saying “we want to be accessible to everybody so we’ll strip out anything that ties us to a time, place, or tradition” is like trying to make a welcoming living room by replacing all the sofas, tables, and rugs with a milk crate and a metal foldout chair.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A few miles away the Boston Athenaeum did a rebrand with the same usual rhetoric on accessibility and diversity, but came through with a font that fits their tradition

Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20210126132351/https://bostonathenaeum.org/

After: https://bostonathenaeum.org/