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Non-recurring character

Tazo is a brand of teas introduced in 1994. The original logo was in Exocet (1991), with an added bar through the Z.

In 2006 the logo was altered to make the T look more like a T and less like a +, I guess to stop people from calling it "Plus Azo". Exocet does actually have a T-shaped version of T, but instead of using that, they constructed the new T themselves.

Then in 2013, they changed the logo again, removing everything unique about it other than the bar through the Z.

Steve Sandstrom, who designed the original 1994 logo, said:

The new Starbucks version of Tazo is on the shelves today. It is stripped clean of the personality and edge that created fans of consumers.

Which is a bit nicer than what Erik Spiekermann said about a similar redesign:

I’m so fed up with marketing people running projects without acknowledging that we designers might have an idea or two about what communicates and what doesn’t. They’ve been told by tech guys and lazy designers that things have to be simplified to work on screens. This is knowledge from the 90s and not true anymore. Risk and guts have been replaced by bullshit “narratives” invented by people who’ve never taken a risk in their lives. This is the blandification of our world, where fun has to be taken out of the equation because it cannot be quantified. No consumer cares about a company’s internal reorganization, they want to like a brand. When all brands are beige, the beigest one will not win but will be forgotten. The enshittification of our world is run by people who read spreadsheets in bed and look at their smartphones to tell the weather instead of sticking their heads out of the window.

#tazo #fonts #exocet