The story of the DeviantArt logo change is an amazing illustration of the “best is the enemy of good” thesis.
DeviantArt is a site that you may not have heard of. Meanwhile, it is the largest social network for artists. Incidentally, it arose back in the days when the concept of “social network” did not yet exist – in 2000.
It is indeed a giant successful platform for “insiders”: 32 million artists, photographers and animators who post 160,000 (think about it!) Of their works on the site every day. Of course, for 15 years, its own atmosphere, rules and powerful traditions have been formed here.
And the Internet all this time did not stand still, and 15 years later it became quite obvious that the old-regime site of an amazing swampy color and a cheap logo from the ICQ era is not the height of perfection.
And so, determined to break with the past, the owners of the portal ordered the rebranding of the Moving Brands studio.
Few can deny that Moving Brands is at the forefront of branding, pushing boundaries and breaking traditions. Suffice it to recall their “revived” work for SwissCom, which spawned a whole wave of “dynamic identity”. Or the Mindshare logo, which abandoned the originality of the form for the sake of uniqueness of color.
DeviantArt’s rebranding is really radical – the DA monogram is hardly recognizable in the logo, and the idea of “cutting corners” in any type composition looks rather intrusive (although it works well in tandem with the work of artists as a background).
However, this is a really big step forward and a good chance for DeviantArt to catch up with the departing train of modern visual language.
More precisely, it could be a good chance, if not for the 32 million people for whom DeviantArt is almost their home. And then someone comes into the house, throws out the old furniture and glues new, but such alien wallpaper.
The storm that has risen vaguely resembles the campaign “Durov, return the wall!”, Which once swept across Vkontakte after the well-known changes.
This is how, for example, the Russian segment of the portal reacted to the innovations:
Moreover, conservative enthusiasts have created special add-ons for popular browsers that change the hated new logo to the familiar old one.
Of course, users will humble themselves and get used to it. And perhaps they will even become attached to the new logo. But this is not the end of the story – the poor “deviants” have a radical redesign of the site ahead, to which it will be even more difficult to get used to. So God give them patience!
And for everyone else, it’s a great way to reflect on the role of design in society: should it meet expectations and indulge existing taste, or, on the contrary, move society forward, even overcoming its resistance?
If we were talking about pure art, then the answer is unambiguous: the artist owes nothing to anyone and is free from other people’s opinions. Society understands this, and even treats with some reverence even the most eccentric manifestations of this freedom: the fact that Van Gogh cut off his ear is known to the public much better than his work.
(It’s funny, by the way, that DeviantArt user artists actually turned out to be not radicals, which would be quite natural, but tough conservatives.)
But design is a different story: its mission is to satisfy the needs of people, to simplify their interaction with the world. If a design object is unpleasant to use, then it is inconvenient to use it, that is, this design does not solve the problem. A designer is not an artist, he cannot exist without feedback from society and its ideas about beauty. On the other hand, the primitive best logo designer who invented the wheel also hardly immediately collected a bunch of “likes” from tribal relatives.