Logo updates are not always improvement

 

Banners outside the New York Historical showing off the rebranded name and logo

I know this is not new, it's just been a while since I have visited the museum formerly known as The New-York Historical Society that now has dropped the hyphen and the last word while adopting a color scheme it considers significant but that is all-too-common in the digital world. And that H just screams modern hospital and not historical to me. 

The above summarizes my point and is a more accurate TL;DR than you're likely to get from an AI overview. Now we'll get more in the context and details associated with why I consider the logo such a disaster. It's not just a question of personal taste but of what the organization and Lippincott (likely a very expensive design agency) claimed they were aiming for with this design and why it fails.

Considering colors and unnecessary hyphens

In their own words, this is what they were after with the colors and the design of the H:

Stemming from the hyphen in “New-York”, the centerpiece of the evolved identity is a bold “H” symbol that reflects the institution’s historical authority and its role in fostering dialogue between different ideas, eras, and individuals. The symbol is paired with a classical name style and historical colors. The orange in the palette is a nod to the state’s origins as a Dutch colony, while the blue references the union of the American flag.

As someone who knows that before New York was named for a place in England, it was called New Amsterdam and that orange was the color associated with the royal family and the House of Orange, I got the color reference even without the explanation. However, it's a bit of stretch to claim the blue as a reference to the American flag, which everyone always refers to as red, white, and blue -- not just blue.

Why drop the red? Obviously, it doesn't go well with orange, which is serving as the warm contrasting color in that color palette -- one you see a lot on websites that seek to convey the combination of blue calmness and dependability with the energy associated with the orange. The colors, however, are the least of their problems.

 The real problem here is the idea of both dropping the hyphen and then claiming to enshrine it in the H by making it stand out in a modern design. That's a contradiction if I ever heard one. There is no reason to memorialize the hyphen in that way. Just let it disappear just like the word "Society." Is there an S to remember that? No, and there shouldn't be. If you rebrand, there's no point in saying we're putting in this feature to remember there used to be a hyphen. That is utterly pointless. 

What the logo should do

Given that the rebrand was about shortening the name to be more inclusive, the logo should have encapsulated that with the new abbreviation of NYH for New York Historical. That would be intuitive and to-the-point. Instead, they opted to the H alone, which with its modern, clean look would be much better-suited to stand for a hospital than a place devoted to recording and exhibiting history. The triple letters would also better match the concept they claim the rebrand is about -- the triple identity of the state as a Native-American then Dutch and then British colony. All that is lost in attempting to convey the brand in a single letter. 

I'm sure many millions of dollars were shelled out for this design and that all the emperor's yes-men had to sing the praises of his new clothes. As the museum draws very small crowds, many of which do not come repeatedly the way I do, they are not likely to face the same kind of backlash retailers like Gap do when their customers really dislike a logo update. 

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Speaking of gifts