Fooled

The Internet is just no fun today. It's April 1st, and virtually everyone feels obliged to post their most hilarious and clever pranks — though they are, more often than not, neither. It isn't that I don't have a sense of humor, just that too much of a good thing is usually anything but.

This post, though — on a new identity for the Dunkin' Donuts chain — had me hoodwinked (upon first reading, at least). Not only because a substantial amount of thought and work was put into the presentation, but because I was just thinking about this, not too long ago.

Some logos don't age well — like music, or fashion, or a fad, there are elements of a design that seem inextricably linked to a particular point in time. (For some of us, anyway. Most people wouldn't much care, but when you work in design, you really can't help but notice this stuff.)


The Dunkin' Donuts logo seems very much a product of its' era, having been introduced in — I can't seem to find a definitive answer to this, but from what I remember — the mid-1970s. (The coffee cup on the left was added in 2002.) And it looks, to me, like it was introduced in the mid-1970s. It's a very simple design, just the company name set in a typeface (Frankfurter) that noboby uses any more (because it seems hopelessly anachronistic), in bright magenta and orange.

(I don't think I've ever found a good use for Frankfurter — but over the past several years, the company has extended it across signage and promotional materials, and I think it all works really well, much better than I would have expected.)

Yet somehow, it doesn't seem dated. It doesn't seem modern, either. It just seems — timeless. The simplicity is the key to the durability. Trends in design (they're closer to fads, really) have come and gone at least a dozen times over in the years since that logo was introduced, but they've all been ignored.