What if famous brands had regular fonts? RegulaBrands

I have a feeling that logo’s with a regular font have a lower recall since people tend to connect with a ‘charming’ difference. But at the same time they can be beneficial many times if the ‘charm’ isn’t met (maybe I am pointing new and old airtel)..
P.S: The data above is by a Business guy, hence designers kindly don’t bash me for my comments/feedbacks.

I would prefer unique fonts anyday. A logo needs to reflect the company’s personality and regular fonts won’t really chaperon that cause.  As the old saying goes, A picture is worth a thousand words. The logo represents that picture and can be remembered and identified with greater ease. Plus the regular font distorts the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo :D

Hmmm… I have to say a lot of these logos posted above look different from Regular Font ones mainly because of certain tweaks like spacing(as in the FED EX logo), lack of elements (like the dot in the discovery logo) and thickness. So here the logos look like imitations as we see on fake products and that’s why are not liking them. But if you had seen them like that from the beginning may be we wouldn’t have hated them. I AM NOT at all saying that brands should go for regular fonts. Not at all. But considering what Audi and Blackberry have done with Arial, and Vogue’s experiment with Times New Roman I think it’s clearly the designer’s ability to turn them around.

Try getting popular logos and their regulabrand from some other countries ( the ones we probably have not seen) and you might see people choosing the regulabrand :D

 Regular fonts are just as good as fancy ones. I would go for something that relates to My products ..and aesthetically makes an impact not depending on which category does the font really falls into.  I Believe ,easier it is  to interpret the  name.. more popular the brand name gets. I Think as a normal consumer the attention span towards the Font of the brand name is only of a few seconds. There is a phenomena that I am sure you are aware of according to which any regular word has a spelling stored in our memories. And even if We find a jumbled up spelling of that word somewhere we are still able to read it clear. To me the Font works exactly the same.

 It could be written in any Font but how its written makes a difference Like I love the *Espree  * is written! But I don’t care what font it is written. Also, my personal style is very ornate! So, I like it If the font is slightly ornate. Depends on what is the connection of the brand with the products they are selling.  But I don’t know If a brand really considers the connect with the products? I mean everybody is selling everything now a days! It can be difficult. I like the way you have redone Vogue in your article. Its interesting. I think the idea is much deeper than what It appears to be.

It depends on the brand. For some, the fonts have become an integral part of their logo, which then means that it’s fundamentally important to their branding. Coca-Cola’s the most obvious example of that out of the ones up there (to me, Facebook’s jarring as well). 

I’d imagine if you did brands like Nike, Apple and McDonald’s, they could get away with it over time since consumers identify so intensely with the Swoosh, the Apple and the Golden Arches. Still, it’d affect the brands in some way.

But Coca-Cola, Disney, Budweiser etc. are brands that rely on that unique font.

An interesting perspective to branding. In most occassions, here, the regular brand was very close to the unique font, in a way. However, a brand logo is just not an icon+text, but its an identity, and has to be reflective of the company’s personality. Having said that, I do believe that if Vogue, Heineken, Audi, Discovery and FedEx had used the regular brand from the beginning, our perception of those brands wouldnt have been much different and yet we would have been talking about how regular fonts can be used to create intense brand communication ;)

my 2 cents

let’s use a simple analogy. 
logo units are the face of a company/product/brand and i wouldn’t name them as mere fonts, regular or unique apart.fonts are rest of the body. (remember that overtime even a workhorse font becomes a sort of visual identity for a company.) both have different usage and identity and one shouldn’t confuse between the two. 

btw, the difference that you are trying to create between a unique vis a vis regular font is based on a matter of exposure over time and not by some innate uniqueness versus commonality. for example, today if brand coca cola authorizes its logo unit font to be commonly used in word processors, it’ll lose its uniqueness pretty soon. it won’t remain a unique brand, will soon become another ordinary name in the crowd.

and last, the term ‘regular brand’ in itself is fallacy. a brand by its very definition has to have a unique identity, if it is regular, it is not a brand.

Nice exercise.!  
I guess regular fonts cannot make the lasting impression as we see them regularly everywhere. Little tweaking or using unique fonts stands them out from regular text.

hmmm… to be very honest. I have mixed reactions to this post. On one side where these regular  fonts don’t hurt at the same time it’s a little harder to imagine all the companies using same fonts over and over again. Type is something that you would use to stand out from the crowd – And standing out is very important! Because we see these regular fonts daily on our computers in various different applications I think our eye’s are trained enough to recognize these regular Type faces. Sometimes it’s not the logo or the icon itself that matters as much as the Type matters. For example – Bell Canada (http://bell.ca) uses a font which is very much close to your regular fonts but you cannot recreate the popular brand experience and identity with regular types. If it was for regular types, companies would not pay Type face designers like Ian Brignell (http://www.ianbrignell.com/) millions of dollars just to create Type faces. So, I believe Type does hold some importance as far as brand identity is concerned.

Now, on the same note – It’s all about experimenting – If Bell had used some regular font for their identity and made me consume that. Well, then that is their branding – I might’ve not cared. So, yes you made a valid point there! It’s all relative.

An interesting post!

Logo is what identifies the brand and keeps its image intact in its customers’ minds. If they’re captured in our regular fonts, the brand loses its uniqueness, more than the logo losing it. It is important for the logo to be unique in order for it cast a lasting impression.

If you tweaked the kerning, some would look fine I think.  But I agree with some of the other posters who said it would get a bit boring if all brands used only a couple of regular fonts.  

This is great! You could probably implement the changes to BlackBerry, Discovery, and Heineken with only the geekiest of logo geeks noticing. Great stuff!

You should do examples for American Airlines, Target, Microsoft, 3M, JCPenney, and Lufthansa. Maybe use Helvetica as the RegulaBrand.

Cough.

Nice idea, thanks for sharing. 

Way to go to ruin logos. Geez.

This article was much needed to illustrate that, logos cannot be designed in MS Word or Paint (or any other non-design software). I am amazed to read the comments that say that if you just fix the ‘kerning’ for the regular system fonts they can be replaced with custom fonts in any famous brands. 

First of all, ‘kerning’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning) is when you ‘edit’ the spaces between letters to make it custom. 

The term you are looking for is ‘tracking’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(typography)), Only a few advanced non-design softwares allow you to proportionally adjust the letter spacing.

But, that is not the point of this article. The idea to be put forward to clients who insist that one can reduce the design process by using any system font.

The whole point of designing a brand is to create a ‘unique’ trademark, exclusive only to that particular entity. If we start using the same 6-7 fonts for all logos just to be supported on ALL computers in the clients office, we have really lost the plot. 

Gotta say, in my eyes (disclaimer: I’m not a designer) little or nothing is lost in most of these font substitutions.

Only
Coca-Cola is an outright downgrade. FedEx also suffers, but only
because the new standardized kerning eliminates the subliminal
arrow formed by the “ex”.

The rest of the logos remain at least
as polished – no worse than lateral moves. In fact, in Unilever’s case,
I’d say there’s a marked improvement! (Although just how “standard” is
Honey Script?)

Not to discount the value of some of the stylized
fonts. Puma and Swatch, in particular, communicate in a distinctive
voice. And I realize there’s a big difference between re-visualizing
familiar logos and creating wholly-new brand identities – the former
violates an established equity while the latter is a blank slate. Still,
as an illustrative example of how critical font/typography is, this
exercise isn’t extreme enough.

Thanks
for the article, perfect  for a current client that uses Helvetica
Black as their current logo font, now can better explain and show examples of this concept of that you can’t
reduce the design process by using any system font and using any old font takes
away the customization of a font. Also, kind of shocked as ‘deepikah’ of the
number of people that complained that the kerning and tracking needs to be
changed, clients wouldn’t change the leading if they designed the logo
themselves with Microsoft or desktop programs. Also even though designers use
standard fonts they still customize the characters to the typeface (to earlier
response) Fedex is a font was achieved by creating a proprietary font, based on
Univers 67 (Bold Condensed) and Futura Bold  to emphasize the arrow
shape: http://logodesignerblog.com/lindon-leader-the-man-behind-the-fedex-logo/

Though I don’t know much about logo designs but as an observer and a Psychology student what I can evaluate is,  what can be created by anyone is not accepted with the same respect as something which is unique…

Reading through the comments makes me realize that a designers trained eye sees so many things that most people glaze over completely. The world is quite spoiled by finessed typography and high end image retouching even in newspapers but design can often be a job that if done properly, no one notices it. By nature, design solves problems. Typography solving the problem such as making things legible. At a higher level even if the typeface or characters that have been tweaked into custom forms create nuances and feelings of a word that make things friendlier or more approachable, more sleek or special. It’s sad how unappreciated design is.