Post- Identity Design: Brands, Politics, and Tech­nological Instability

In September 2015 Google redesigned its visual identity. As part of the new system Google’s engineers created an automatic process that could generate thousands of different vector-based iterations of the logo. This action was taken to satisfy potential viewing scenarios based on, for instance, screen size, or the background against which the logo is displayed. Within these variations they made a tiny version that only comprises 305 bytes of data. The older logo was formally more complex and its smallest version was approximately 14,000 bytes; this relatively larger file size prompted the adoption of a text-based variation as a workaround for weak Internet connections, a compromise that allowed room for inconsistencies if the proper fonts weren’t available on the user’s end.¹

The relative simplicity of the new logo, then, was about more than just the formal, aesthetic qualities of the mark. A major part of it was about the desire for pixel-perfect efficiency and cross-platform accessibility—the need to accommodate the thousands of possible scenarios triggered by computers accessing the logo. As users embrace diverse communication devices, visual consistency has become very difficult for brands to maintain. Google’s new 305-byte logo instigated discussions online and motivated skeptical compression specialists and aficionados to research different ways to generate the graphic while maintaining its extremely small size. The process of re-creating the logo outlined on blogs—explaining its elemental geometry, with its few circles and lines—is an interesting narrative. One wonders how small another logo with more anchor points could get. And how this logic of design for mass dissemination driven by data constraints could transfer to other brands, and to our broader contemporary visual culture.

In the new identity announcement, Google articulated the need to have such a small logo for “broader distribution,” explaining that “consistency has a tremendous impact when you consider our goal of making Google more accessible and useful to users around the world, including the next billion.”² By “the next billion” they meant Southeast Asia, where Google recently established an engineering team to help improve online connectivity in the region. Internet access is certainly beneficial, but we cannot forget that Google is a business that grows as the Internet expands. Furthermore, we need to analyze these actions beyond the corporate sphere and within a political perspective, since developments in technology are blurring distinctions between private and public entities and driving complex shifts in notions of agency and power.

This essay is an effort to investigate the changing landscape where visual identity operates. It explores an alternative perspective, within and beyond graphic design, to the capital-oriented purposes of branding and the absolutist logic of design itself. Not only does identity design remain bound to old ideologies that have become obsolete in our technologically evolving world, but it also reinforces the economic hegemonies that have led to the political instabilities we see today. Information platforms are altering traditional forms of governance, as state and non-state powers embrace surveillance, digital propaganda, and globally distributed data networks as their own brand strategies. Yet there is room for optimism that these technologies might also enable pluralistic information systems and decentralized forms of power.

Within the last decade, identity design shifted focus from enclosed systems to systems that react to external parameters. Dynamic identities have become not only a stylistic expectation, but also a technical necessity. Yet while much contemporary design does include performative, programmatic, and participatory elements, current forms of social organization—whether institutions, corporations, or nations—are more interdependent, unpredictable, and indeterminate than ever. And contemporary visual systems are proving incapable of communicating such levels of intricacy, persisting in their unrealistic usage of restricted sets of visual forms. We tend to think about new approaches in design as expansions of the field, but we could also understand them as recalibrations following a loss of control over the continuum from form, to content, to context.

Technology is increasingly dictating how we interact with companies. Yet current platforms of communication are highly unstable environments, and designs easily become obsolete as platforms mutate or disappear. Contemporary visual culture is subject to unpredictable variables, ranging from screen resolution to color calibration, browser settings, software updates, file formats, programming languages, distortions caused by malware, and malfunctions and misuses in computing. The haze manifests itself in (and is determined by) the peculiar and the global, from the struggle of customizing an email signature or the typesetting limitations of iOS, to cultural idiosyncrasies and technological accessibility across entire countries.

The reductive nature of branding is in part rooted in the limitations of older reproduction technologies. Yet current communication platforms are becoming more flexible. Screens and interfaces are multidimensional as layers, windows, and storing features that allow users to travel data sets over time. Identity design systems can incorporate such plasticity and manifest multiple formal, conceptual, and contextual expressions simultaneously. Design has the potential to reflect the complexity of the world, instead of filtering it through distillation strategies. While doing so designers can embrace weakness, not necessarily as reductive formal gestures but by using signs whose meaning is in constant flux. Images can be visually simple or complex, but weak in the cultural and historical associations they carry. Rather than atemporality, weakness within design can aim for immediacy and impermanence.

Identity design principles were founded on the notion of a universal language, but within a neoliberal framework, inequality becomes normative. If the goal of modern design was to communicate across boundaries, corporate design is by nature exclusionary. Brands now are the visual articulation of intellectual property as a form of currency. Given the networked conditions of economies of scale, the origins of products have blurred, and copies have multiplied. As objects and services increase in similarity, the more valuable it is to be perceived as unique. Thus the need for companies to develop and manage identifiers that distinguish them from competitors. The value of commodities lies not on their tangible dimension and potential to satisfy actual needs, but in the signifiers that make them desirable to consumers.

Design can operate from a position of uncertainty, and projects can act as indeterminate propositions rather than affirmative statements. Uncertainty can be used to generate critical work, and an ongoing sense of doubt that constantly questions the project’s outcomes. Embracing uncertainty might be not only an ethical decision, but a necessary one. As we continue to incorporate technologies into our knowledge production systems, new forms of cognition are being introduced to our conceptual landscape. Complex algorithms and pattern recognition are challenging our capacity for abstraction. We need to reevaluate our capacity for knowing, understanding, representing, and communicating.

We need to design software and interfaces that can process information and visualize difference in nonlinear ways, and networked spaces where points of view are permanently being exchanged—where meaning is built through interaction and direct experience rather than by the construction of figurative value and speculative attributes. This could lead to degrees of stylistic standardization but also to the enhancement of collectively controlled technologies able to modulate and extrapolate diverse perspectives. Communication platforms are the power infrastructures of today: they both dictate the behaviors of society and enable spaces for change. As [theorist Benjamin] Bratton suggests, platforms “centralize (like states), scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid but universal protocols, even as they decentralize (like markets), coordinating economies not through the superimposition of fixed plans but through interoperable and emergent interaction.”³