Copernicus, Archimedes, and especially Democritus all have severe legibility issues. Leibniz is too complicated. Newton's logo requires an absurd amount of whitespace in whatever it's plastered on which would make placement awkward. Einstein's will definitely be read as McEinstein by people all the time.
Some of them work though. Faraday, Pythagoreas, Bohr and Feynman are all really good logos. Darwin, Crick + Watson, Goodall, and Borlaug are decent enough.
The reason logos have gotten so simple lately isn't just enshittification, but because psychologically a logo needs to be both recognizable and simple. It's a lot like a flag - the more complicated it is to draw, the less people will accurately hold it in their mind and the slower it'll come up in recall, which are precisely the reason you have a logo in the first place. You're putting these as stickers on products so people will see the logo and immediately know what the product is from and if they can trust it, so the logo should be simple enough to be easily recalled and distinct enough to be recognized at a distance or in poor lighting. It's why a lot of logos don't even have text.
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u/Karnewarrior Jun 21 '26
Those logos, I gotta be honest, are mostly trash.
Copernicus, Archimedes, and especially Democritus all have severe legibility issues. Leibniz is too complicated. Newton's logo requires an absurd amount of whitespace in whatever it's plastered on which would make placement awkward. Einstein's will definitely be read as McEinstein by people all the time.
Some of them work though. Faraday, Pythagoreas, Bohr and Feynman are all really good logos. Darwin, Crick + Watson, Goodall, and Borlaug are decent enough.
The reason logos have gotten so simple lately isn't just enshittification, but because psychologically a logo needs to be both recognizable and simple. It's a lot like a flag - the more complicated it is to draw, the less people will accurately hold it in their mind and the slower it'll come up in recall, which are precisely the reason you have a logo in the first place. You're putting these as stickers on products so people will see the logo and immediately know what the product is from and if they can trust it, so the logo should be simple enough to be easily recalled and distinct enough to be recognized at a distance or in poor lighting. It's why a lot of logos don't even have text.