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| Banners outside the New York Historical showing off the rebranded name and logo |
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 or the backlash that Cracker Barrel came to experience in August 2025.
Losing the Heart of the Logo and Customers
Marketers often make the mistake of assuming that any modernization of a brand has to be an improvement. There may be some truth to that if your brand is about being innovative. But when your brand is meant to harken back to tradition and nostalgia, you may want to rethink a strategy that may be throwing out the very thing your customers value most.
So how do you know if you've made the right decision? Stock prices plunges are a pretty good indication that you have not, and even with the rate of inflation today, a drop of $94 million in a single day is a significant hit for a business.
Instead of just getting all the yes-men on your marketing and design team to agree that it looks great because it is cleaner and more modern, you need to do research ahead of time about which part of the logo is most appealing to your customers. While I can't claim to be a Cracker Barrel customers myself, my guess is that the picture part that shows the man and the barrel that really represents the "old country store" concept resonates more strongly with them than the color yellow and the name itself.
rebrand logo fail
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