graphic design – Pathetic Fallacy

Less Fun than a Barrel of Crackers

Header image: S.O. Grimes general store, Westminster, Md., c. 1900. Image via Library of Congress.

Another day, another shot fired in the culture wars: this time, the internet is losing its collective mind over the new logo for Cracker Barrel. If you are unaware of the controversy, congratulations—you might consider skipping reading the rest of this essay to remain in blissful ignorance.

To summarize: Cracker Barrel, that paragon of blandly inoffensive roadside dining, has decided that its long-standing theming to evoke early 20th century general stores might be limiting its appeal to Gen Z, and so has embarked on a brand makeover that downplays the hokey country charm. Part of this rebrand is a simplified logo that ditches an illustration depicting a gentleman in overalls perched on a wicker seat ladder back chair and leaning against the titular barrel. (This man, “Uncle Herschel,” was a real person.)

Cracker Barrel logos, left: 1977, right: 2025.

To say that the change has not been taken well by the chain-restaurant-going public would be an understatement. Some of those seeing red also see a political conspiracy—from “influencers” who say that the logo is stripping culture and heritage away from rural white Americans, to Fox News hosts claiming that corporate moves such as this logo change are why President Trump needs to send troops to Chicago. Underlying these criticisms is the assumption that the rebrand is part of an insidious “woke” movement perpetrated by American businesses.

The truth is, no corporation wants to touch anything political with a twelve-foot pole, especially these days. Look at what happened to the department store Target, which caught flack from the right for daring to stock pride merchandise, only to get hit even harder from the left for caving to anti-DEI pressure. Walmart and Amazon have also been subject to boycotting headaches over DEI policies and allegations of abetting the Trump administration. No, politics have nothing to do with the decision to change the Cracker Barrel logo—although it remains to be seen if political outrage from consumers can be sustained.¹

The rebrand reminds me of a similar kerfuffle last year involving the British confection Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Americans may be confused that such a product exists in the first place; but they would be even more baffled by the logo for the sugar refinery Abram Lyle & Sons, which consists of bees swarming about the corpse of a lion. The company’s motto, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness” points to the source of this imagery, the biblical tale of Samson’s riddle². All of which is to say that this is the most badass logo ever, as well as being an amazingly long-lived one—it dates to 1883. In 2024, Lyle & Sons decided that this work of art was too morbid, and replaced it with a more anodyne illustration of a syrupy lion. This change was also greeted with political accusations.

But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the rationale is to remove any attributes that might complicate a consumer’s attitude towards the brand. It also reflects the desire of new executives to mark their territory by peeing on it—see HBO’s constant rebranding, or Elon Musk destroying the only part of Twitter that had any value, its name recognition.

If you want to be charitable, and I try to be when I can, the move towards brand simplification also reflects a longstanding adage in design—be it visual art, design, writing, or engineering: “less is more.” This saying, often misattributed to Mies van der Rohe, emphasizes clarity and utility. The goal is to focus on what is essential. Practitioners of this belief make outsized claims about the effects of this approach. In his seminal work Understanding Comics (1993), cartoonist Scott McCloud claims that idiographic drawings amplify meaning. He also claims that in simplified, “cartoony” design, viewers can insert themselves into the depiction³. I love McCloud to pieces but this all seems a bit farfetched to me.

Scott McCloud claims that simplification leads to self-identification. *Understanding Comics*, 1993.

There’s a lot to be said for purposeful simplicity. Growing up in the 70s and 80s I was surrounded by, and loved, logos by Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, and Paul Rand, all of whom were known for absolutely iconic, geometric, minimalist designs. But these artists, working before digital tools, had to visualize their designs as tight, abstract forms. They did not select something they liked from the font menu, slap it on a generic color shape, shut down Adobe Illustrator and call it a day. Even at their simplest, the great Modernist graphic designers had a sense of context and of play. They weren’t afraid of their work conveying an attitude.

And it’s attitude that’s missing from the Cracker Barrel rebrand. The original logo wasn’t great, in much the same way that the actual restaurants aren’t great. But it did have a point of view, and that’s what the new design is lacking. As a rule of thumb, good design is supposed to not draw more attention than the message it conveys. But when design fades away into no design, the message also disappears. When you look at the new Cracker Barrel logo, ask yourself: would you even know what good or service it represents if you didn’t already know the brand name? Here, look at what happens when you replace the words:

Is it a clothing line? Is it a cake mix?

It also remains to see if Cracker Barrel is going to remain committed to this rebrand, given the fact that their stock is being absolutely destroyed. ↩︎
If you’re not familiar with the Book of Judges: Samson, on the way to visit his future bride Timnah, is set upon by a lion. The hero kills the beast with his bare hands. Sometime later he returned to the scene of the attack and found that a colony of bees had made a hive in the lion’s body. Samson eats some of the honey. Returning to marry Timnah, he tells the bridal party (made up of Philistines, who are his sworn enemies) that they must answer a riddle or forfeit their clothes: “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.” Ultimately this story does not end well for Samson, Timnah, or the Philistines. ↩︎
Amusingly, in his essay “Modern Cartoonist,” comics artist Dan Clowes takes exception to McCloud’s theory: “Comics tend to lean toward the iconic (‘The Adventures of a featureless blob'”‘) because it encourages reader identification. Let’s get away from this arena of vagueness (a cheap gimmick designed to flatter the shallow reader)” Eightball 18, 1997. ↩︎

Fonts of Knowledge

Nobody likes a smart ass, and I try my best not to be one. But there’s one pedantic quibble that I struggle with, and that’s pointing out when someone uses a word isn’t quite the word they want. I come by this honestly enough: I’m a writer who values clarity and I have that autistic compulsion to be precise, even when I know it’s a linguistic battle I won’t win.

For example, back in the 90’s, people started using the word “impact” as a verb: This decision impacts us all. This drove me absolutely nuts, because “impact” was and had always been a noun, and it meant “a point of collision,” and when people used it as a verb what they really meant was “affect:” This decision affects us all, and using “impact” was dumb business-speak, using a word that sounds important instead of the perfectly good word that is the right one. I remember talking about this with a professor of mine and she pointed out that exactly the same sort of complaint was lodged against the word “contact” which was not used as a verb to mean get in touch with, reach out to, write, phone, etc. until the 1920s. She told me this as a friendly way to say “just let it go,” but the effect on me was I immediately stopped using “contact” as anything but a noun.

This is a lot of preamble to arrive at the subject of this essay, the word “font,” which these days generally means “typeface,” or “the digital file that describes a typeface.” But this isn’t its exact use, at least, it wasn’t until very recently, and I feel like something has been lost in the contemporary definition—precision, yes, but more importantly the richness of printing history, and understanding the transition from an analog to a digital world.

When in the 15th century moveable type printing came to the Western world from its origin in China, the models printers used to design letters came from existing medieval and Renaissance hands. Gutenberg’s Bible (c. 1455) used a movable type equivalent of the 12th century hand blackletter, an ornate style executed with a chisel nib, which these days is mostly used on diplomas and other formal or legal documents (or, sadly, by white supremacists). As the technology of moveable type spread, Venetian printers modeled their letters after the humanist minuscule hand, a Renaissance cross between classical Roman carved text—which only had capital letters—and the manuscript style used in copies of the vulgate bible—letterforms we would now identify as lowercase. Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420–1480) is today credited with developing the modern printed Roman alphabet.

To produce enough type to set pages, designers would cut master forms called “punches” from slugs of steel; the craftspeople who did this were called “punch cutters.” These punches would be hammered into copper molds which would then be cast into individual letterforms using easily melted, inexpensive alloys of lead, tin, and/or antimony. The characters produced in this manner were uniform and plentiful. But they were also unique to the print shop, and guarded from duplication, since they were a valuable commodity. Making these alphabets by hand required much labor up front and printers had access to only a few variants.

In 1476, William Caxton brought the printing press to London, and the commercial use of moveable type exploded. Soon after, Paris also became a center for printing, culminating in the type designed by Claude Garamond in the years 1520 to 1560 (there are many contemporary typefaces called “Garamond” which imitate his work, to a greater or lesser degree). With the growth of an industry, print shops looked for alternatives to cutting their own punches. Developing an alphabet was a specialized skill, and printers wanted to have a variety of styles and sizes of characters on hand. So an associated industry emerged: foundries, companies that designed and cut punches and then cast the alphabet on demand. A matching set of characters, including numbers, punctuation, and duplicates, was sold as a set called a font, from the Middle French fonte, meaning cast in metal.

By the by, there’s a popular etymology that says the word “font” was derived from “fount,” as in the case of letters being a source like a fountain. This is charming but entirely made up.

It’s important to note that in this context a font was a complete set of characters at a specific size and style. If you wanted a larger or smaller size of the same typeface, that was a different font and was a different purchase. Likewise, the italic or bold style of a typeface required a separate font. Being a collection of physical metal objects, fonts had to be sorted and stored. When a typesetter was to set a block of text, they organized the font in a large open boxes called type cases, with individual characters in their own separate cubbyholes. The majuscule characters were placed in an upper case, and the minuscule characters were in the lower case, which is where the terms uppercase and lowercase originated. (Other phases that come from moveable type include “mind your p’s and q’s,” referring to how easily the characters could be confused, especially since the metal type was in reverse; and “out of sorts,” which originally meant “lacking enough of a character to finish setting a page,” like when a typesetter ran out of E’s or ampersands. There are more!)

Flash forward to 1986 and the original Macintosh operating system. Macintoshes were the first inexpensive consumer computers that had proportional type (that is, letters that varied in width, unlike typewriters whose letters were all spaced the same). They also shipped with a variety of different typefaces built into the system; these could communicate with photostatic laser printers, which were also newly available to consumers and institutions at (relatively) low costs. The practical upshot of this was that text could be typeset and printed at the desktop level. While the printed text could be at any arbitrary size, the on-screen text had to be designed for the screen’s resolution. This required different description files for italics and boldface, as well as for each size: 9 point, 10 point, 12 point, etc. This division by typeface, style, and size was closely analogous to traditional cast metal fonts and so that’s what Apple called the files that stored this information.

As screens increased in resolution and CPUs increased in speed, eventually computers could resize text without needing separately sized files. But for a generation with no knowledge of fonts as anything but files on a computer, the name stuck, and neither Apple nor Microsoft, nor any third-party typeface designers, changed or clarified the file type. And so now “font” is synonymous with “typeface,” and in fact, few people who aren’t graphic designers even know what at typeface is.

And so it goes. Language always evolves, and people complain that words changing are being misused. The title of this essay is another example of this: many claim the phrase should be “fount of knowledge,” not “font,” because in this case we are talking about a fountain. It’s kind of silly. But as Ms. Mitchell sings, something’s lost and something’s gained. Sometimes we loose a bit of history, a bit of perspective, a distinction that goes beyond mere definition.

But, as I said at the start, I try not to be a smart ass. Some times I try harder than others.

Give us those nice bright colors, give us the greens of summer

By now you’ve had a little time to make your peace with the new Instagram icon. In the accelerated, media-savvy world of Internet 2.0 (or whatever release number we’re on), there have been already been critical essays on how bad the redesign is (for an example, see this Adweek piece) and a backlash about how old farts just hate change of any sort (for an example, see the comments section of the Adweek piece). Instagram themselves shared a statement about the change, with the usual design-speak explanation that skeuomorphism is old news, that the icon is a doorway into the app and that the app GUI is tailored to the way users use the lightweight photo-manipulation / sharing system.

For me, the rationale is depressingly predictable. In the mobile scene, the clinical eye of Jonny Ive has cast its gaze over everything, and we’re told that all users want is an interface that gets out of the way and disappears entirely into a mist of flat gradients and semi-transparencies. Never mind that bright colors and heavily-stroked geometric forms are as invisible as traffic signs—which are, after all, brightly-colored, heavily-stroked geometric forms—in about five years they are going to be as dated as 90s’ bevels and drop shadows.

But I get that Instagram wants to move on. When it first launched (only four years ago) it was known primarily for its filters, which gave a patina of vintage charm to the most ephemeral of digital productions, the smart phone photograph. Instagram was adopted by the hipsters, who delighted in making their locally-sourced artisanal breakfast sandwich look as though it had been photographed in 1973 by a Poloraid Land camera, or as though that afternoon’s thrift-shop find had been kicking around since 1932, as evidenced by the sepia tone of this faux silver print. Of course, everyone hates hipsters, especially hipsters, and Instagram was snapped up by Facebook, which means it’s time to move on and embrace a more generic identity.

But what’s lost in the rebranding is the sense of play. Social media platforms operate on one level as convenient publishing systems for nonspecialists to share information, but on another level they are games whose rules become defined by their user base. Tumblr is technically a lightweight blog platform, but its character comes from the community drawn to it, whose users have developed a protocol for the correct way to appropriate media and repost it. Snapchat’s character arises from the community’s interest in intimacy and immediacy. Twitter is where everyone wants to be the most clever. For its brief life, Instagram’s quirks (square photos, obvious filters) have combined with urbane hipster tastes to encourage an aesthete’s view of the world: photos of alleyways, wrought-iron fences, graffiti on brick walls. No doubt Facebook wants users of all stripes to embrace the application, and your aunt and uncle may have no use for another picture of a manhole cover, but they might consider dropping $40 on a photo book of baby pics.

Still, I had a lot of fondness for the Instagram camera icon. In the iPhone’s sea of flat infographics, it was the one hold-out for charm and play. It was sort of oddball, it was sort of ugly. Mostly, it was distinctive, and that loss of distinction is the saddest part. When I was a child, the Holiday Inn “Great Signs” still dotted highways in the midwest. Incongruous and garish, they spoke to the past futurism of the Atomic Age. I remember looking for them on the horizon under the stars during family road trips. They were weird, they were unique. And when at last Holiday Inn decided to replace them, they went for the most bland, most uninteresting alternative. No child would search the night sky for that sign. And no one will pause and smile before tapping the new Instagram icon.