Emblemetric’s James I. Bowie writes about the Google Workspace rebrand, including the demise of the Gmail envelope, for Marker, Medium’s business publication:

Those New G-Suite Logos Everyone Hates? They’re Actually a Smart Idea

Emblemetric’s James I. Bowie writes about the branding of Driftwell, Pepsi’s new “enhanced water beverage,” for Marker, Medium’s business publication:

How Pepsi Got Suckered Into Every Hot Branding Trend

For Marker magazine, Emblemetric’s James I. Bowie has written about Spotify’s underwhelming branding:

The Strange, Uninspired History of Spotify’s Bland Logo

Emblemetric’s James I. Bowie has written an article for Marker about how US banks in the 1960s and 70s used newspaper ads to introduce their new abstract logos:

The Surprising Reason Why All Bank Logos Look the Same

James I. Bowie

The annual celebration of Earth Day highlights an environmental consciousness that is becoming increasingly important as the threats associated with global warming rise. Yet American logo design has recently seen a resurgence of marks featuring smokestacks and factories which hearkens back to the earliest days of corporate symbolism in a rather environmentally unfriendly way. What’s behind this trend?

When companies first needed to express a visual identity to the public, the factory was a popular image to use. In his 1998 history of American business identity, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business, Roland Marchand pointed out that “during the late nineteenth century and even later in some cases, as industries rapidly expanded, the factory image made good sense as a merchandising and public relations vehicle. Impressive and often romanticized, it assured customers that they were dealing with a stable, competent firm.” It had been noted that “these depictions [of factories] sought to hearten executives and impress viewers by displaying billows of (productive) black smoke spouting from a multitude of chimneys.” Marchand reported that “corporations selling products as varied as yeast, razor blades, fertilizer, and underwear all greeted the public with pictures of the factory.”

Late nineteenth-century trade cards depicting factories (Marchand, 1998)

The factory with smokestacks cliché in logo design persisted into the 1970s. Designer Jerry Herring’s 1975 pamphlet “Stock Trade Marks,” which satirized the lookalike logos of the time, asked the tongue-in-cheek question, “Dear corporation president, public relations director, or agency art buyer: Are you in need of a dynamic new image to replace the smoking smoke stacks you or your client is now using as a trade mark?”

Analysis of data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization, though, shows that by the seventies, the factory smokestack logo was on its way out, before reaching its nadir in the 1990s. But over the past two decades, these logos have rebounded to become more common again in the United States, although not in the rest of the world. American designers seem to revel in the graphic possibilities of the factory’s wafting smoke and distinctive sawtooth roof.

The popularity of these new smoky logos appears to be explainable in two ways. First, many of these marks use detailed, realistic depictions of factories to convey a sense of nostalgic authenticity, particularly for businesses with a hipster appeal, such as craft breweries. This attempt to invoke “old-timeyness” can also be seen in the use of logo design elements such as crossed objects, mustaches, and establishment dates.

Second, many of these new logos depict the factory in an abstract way, one that is figurative rather than literal. These logos often represent companies that don’t actually have factories; it’s just that the idea that their particular product (movies, games, cartoons) might be manufactured in a factory is whimsical and amusing.

But why would companies take the risk of offending the environmentally-sensitive public with these factory and smokestack images? As the Environmental Protection Agency data in the graph below shows, industrial emissions of carbon monoxide, a major greenhouse gas, have declined dramatically in the U.S. since 1970 as stricter environmental regulations have been put in place and industrial manufacturing has moved overseas.

There are simply fewer smoky factories in the U.S. than there used to be. It may be that to many younger Americans, a factory spewing smoke is just not something that they ever encounter in their lives, and so the image of the factory functions more as a metaphor, a symbol of productivity or of historical sentimentality, rather than as a literal threat to their environment, making these logos acceptable in a way that they would not have been a few decades ago.

James I. Bowie

At Halloween, skulls and skeletons make for popular decorations, but in recent years they have been appearing with much greater frequency as design elements in American logos. Skulls, in particular, seem to have assumed a more prominent place in trademarks. Before the turn of the millennium, not many organizations, outside of the occasional rock band or biker gang, were interested in adopting a logo featuring a skull, traditionally the most common memento mori, or reminder of death. The skull’s long-held associations with piracy and poison did not help, either.

But analysis of United States Patent and Trademark Office data shows that between 2000 and 2009, the percentage of new logos with skulls and skeletons more than quintupled, and has remained at this higher level ever since.

What accounts for this increase? The trend toward skull logos has not been as noticeable outside of the United States. Analysis of World Intellectual Property Organization data from more than 100 other countries shows that the use of skulls and skeletons in logos also rose during the first decade of the millennium, but not nearly to the extent seen in the US.

It’s hard to ignore that the increase in American skull logos took place at the same time that the nation assumed a war footing after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the number of combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, so did the number of skull logos in the US. It does not seem unreasonable to speculate that, just as the use of logos featuring hearts increased after September 11, the specter of death raised by these wars permeated American culture and saw its expression in symbols of commerce. As these wars wound down, the use of skull logos leveled off, but has stayed high.

An examination of today’s American skull logos shows a variety of businesses exhibiting crude expressions of menace, juvenile assertions of badassedness, and more than a little fascist iconography. There are some exceptions to these trends, including the recent popularity of the calavera (the Mexican “sugar skull” used to celebrate Día de los Muertos) as a logo design element. But for the most part, these skull logos are more trick and less treat.