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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. We need to analyze these actions beyond the corporate sphere and within a political perspective.

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.” 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.

The principles of much twentieth-century modern art and design involved the development of a universal visual language. Through notions such as simplification, abstraction, consistency, and differentiation, artists and designers aimed to communicate through form-making regardless of the connection between signs and their contexts. After World War II, many artistic movements aimed to develop a sort of graphic grammar charged with inherent meaning. Looking for clarity and objectivity in visuals, these approaches sought to contribute to postwar order and to improve international relationships. The transition to a neoliberal society, however, brought new complexity to industries, and accelerated technology in remarkable ways. With the rise of the Internet and desktop computing, design tools became ubiquitous, opening up the study of the contextual and relational dimensions of the discipline. As Andrew Blauvelt writes, design today “explores its effects on users, its pragmatic and programmatic constraints, its rhetorical impact, and its ability to facilitate social interactions.”₂

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.

We mainly engage with services and products through third-party vocabularies, in tweets and hyperlinks. Uber is Lyft and a Toyota Prius; MoMA’s mark is textable; McDonald’s is filled with Pokemon. Corporations are nesting within one another. Platforms like Apple News or AMP aggregate information from diverse sources yet distill their graphics to present feeds within their own template logics. This presents a whole new set of relationships toward information and among companies, as platforms subsume and dictate other brands’ signifiers. Furthermore, technology companies become parasitical—able to embed themselves within other entities’ visual systems. 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.