Goodbye Uncle Herschel

Cracker Barrel is an American chain of restaurants specializing in country food – something that I, an Italian living in Portugal, had no idea about. This was until the news spread worldwide that the chain’s stock had plummeted because of a new logo. In a regrettable rebranding, Uncle Herschel (the chain’s own Colonel Sanders) and the eponymous cracker barrel were dropped, giving way to a flat, rather dull, generically modern emblem. As a result, no one was happy, except perhaps those who believe in “the power of design” – the power to make you instantly lose $100 million in market value.

On the left, Cracker Barrel’s old logo; on the right, the new one.

How did that happen? A newly appointed president and CEO, Julie Felss Masino, concluded the restaurants needed an update, so she initiated a complete overhaul (code name: “All the More”) featuring country musician Jordan Davis and spanning the menu, the decor and, of course, the brand identity. It was the latter, in particular, that critics ferociously attacked. To them, the new logo no longer represented the chain, but rather the cabal of corporate drones and marketing firms now in charge of it. On X, Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator, pointed out that “Cracker Barrel enlisted THREE marketing agencies to come up with their new logo and remodel. Three agencies collaborated for months to make their brand more generic. Like I said, the marketing industry is completely fake. It’s a 500 billion dollar scam”.

In the days that followed, the logo suffered the usual crowdsmashing destiny, but the outrage was unprecedented: Cracker Barrel was cast as a staple of U.S. identity, prompting a deluge of now all-too-common “woke” accusations. Suddenly, what was at stake was no longer a design controversy but the eternal struggle between the people and the elite. Eventually, the President of the United States himself weighed in, calling for the reinstatement of the old design: “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again”. So, after just one week, the chain issued a statement reassuring customers (“We said we would listen, and we have”) and rolled back the old logo. The CEO took the fall, if only symbolically, as Masino declared she felt as though she was “fired by America”. She wasn’t the only scapegoat, though: Cracker Barrel investors were also advised to oust a board member with expertise in DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), who was seen as one of the marketing figures responsible. Unfortunately, hitting the rewind button could not prevent all the damage, which amounted to a 5.7% loss in the first quarter. Still, the chain got some free visibility, namely an AI-generated video where Trump dances with the restaurant’s “old timer”. Uncle Herschel is so back.

An Uncle Herschel meme posted on X.

A Bland Nothing

Another old timer, Tommy Lowe, took on the rebrand in a pretty moving NewsChannel 5 interview. Asked about the logo, the co-founder of Cracker Barrel, 93, called it “a bland nothing. It is pitiful”. And, quite frankly, it is hard not to agree after seeing the original handmade, barrel-shaped menu designed by the other founder, Dan Evins. Some trivia on the chain’s website shed light on its design:

The menu’s handwriting had intentional misspellings and folksy phrases, which was Dan’s idea. His original vision was to make them look like a brown paper bag, reminiscent of those you would get at a country store. Guests could take the menus with them as souvenirs and something they could pass along to others.

This is about as “vernacular” as it gets, with all due respect to Tibor Kalman, Alexander Isley and Restaurant Florent.

The original Cracker Barrel menu from 1969.

Whereas veteran patrons, red-pilled podcasters and terminally online conservatives hated the new logo, branding and design experts were fine with it. According to Brand New’s Armin Vit, “by any objective standard of what proper logo design is, there was nothing good about the old logo and there is nothing wrong with the new logo.” Nothing good about the old logo?! Cracker Barrel itself made a convincing case for it: “The ‘K’ in ‘Cracker’ has a charming flourish that flows into the pinto bean shape, tying it all together”. I, for one, can see the charm, which is totally gone in the new version.

Cracker Barrel co-founder Tommy Lowe interviewed by NewsChannel 5’s Carrie Sharp, 2025.

The thing is, almost nothing absolute can be said about a visual artifact; any claim only holds in relation to particular schools of thought, or ideologies, if you will. Vit’s ideology – what he calls “proper logo design” – is one that values simplification (or perhaps reduction, as the word “simplicity” is already ideological). He’s not alone: Kelly O’Keefe, a brand strategist at Brand Federation, argued that the redesign clears up an “overly complex logo”. Now, speaking of simplification is itself a simplification because, as Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver put it in Adhocism (1972), “The present environment is tending towards both extreme visual simplicity and extreme functional complexity. This double and opposite movement is eroding our emotional transaction with and comprehension of the environment.” In other words, the superficial simplicity of a logo is complemented by the complexity of its outputs, which involve a kaleidoscope of artifacts, media, devices and platforms, and extend to the public’s reaction.

“Deconstructed Fried Rice” by pixieshit¹, 2023.

For simplification to operate at all, it has to adopt a particular way of looking at an artifact: it has to label it complex in order to simplify it, while sweeping all the chaos it cannot simplify (such as Uncle Herschel) under the rug of history. Without doing this, it would be jobless. The army knife of visual simplification has several tools, such as element reduction, non-redundancy, abstraction, avoidance of depth, and a preference for the discrete over the continuous. All of these no-gos are present in the new-now-old Cracker Barrel logo. But they all rest on a broader ambition, which I would put as follows: The promise of simplification is to maintain, or even increase, semantic depth through synthesis. When synthesis is missing, what you get is blandness.

The Inevitable Future of Branding, 2012. Source unknown.

All these aspects seem to conform to the general rule of contemporary branding, but I believe they also lie at the heart of graphic design culture. Portuguese design critic Mário Moura puts it concisely: graphic design is a style turned into a discipline, “a style that deliberately detached itself from art history because it suited a number of purposes”. This style cloaked itself in pseudo-general principles and rule of thumbs, now crystallized in software that allows them to be broken with ease. That’s what makes it possible for me to say, “this is so graphic design,” or, when I want to feel the thrill of youth, “woah, graphic designcore!”. Of course, there are exceptions, but they function exactly as exceptions, as subconscious reflexes to the simplifying norm. Beyond those, what you get is either professional decorum or emulative blandness. Muriel Cooper, the Vignellis, Paul Rand… the American Gods are still upon us, but they’re old and tired.

Instagram logo evolution.

Dead-ass Honesty > Design

Old and tired. Could we say the same for graphic design culture at large? Take a meme, admittedly not very funny, which circulated recently on the social media pages of brands and institutions, from Colgate to the Brazilian government: it reads “our graphic designer is out today”, typically scrawled in Microsoft Paint or by hand, and promotes authenticity by pointing at the very absence of the designer. It’s the triumph of software culture, with its own digital vernacular, on graphic design culture. But that’s not all. A sentiment circulating among VC founders holds that an ugly pitch signals self-confidence and pragmatism. One of its proponents, Mohamed Hassan Al Sheraie, puts it bluntly: “If your pitch deck is ugly, I’ll assume you’re too busy building a company instead of designing slides like a PwC intern”. He then sums it up with a simple formula: Dead-ass honesty > Design.

Graphic design has also become a blatant signifier of gentrification: the moment you see a café adorned with vector mascots, designerly typefaces and the like, you know it will be overpriced. No one has captured this phenomenon better than the Instagram page Doomscroll Forever, which went so far as to propose a “no graphic design zone”. Truth be told, the city itself is becoming a “no graphic designer zone”, with that lifestyle losing its appeal, especially when it comes to aging practitioners. As cities grow more expensive, graphic design work – especially gig work – is no longer sufficient to afford life in places increasingly wrapped in gentrifying graphics. In his novel Perfection (2022), Vincenzo Latronico portrays Anna and Tom, a Berlin-based Millennial designer couple who stay busy creating “differences” as the city slowly but surely changes: “An obsession with real estate – imported by the New Yorkers together with the bedbugs – dominated conversation. Everyone was looking for a better apartment and a fairer deal, or they wanted to know how much others were paying.” In fact, Millennials, the people of “work hard & be nice to people”, know, more than previous and successive generations, that during the 2010s design carried a meaning beyond itself, a meaning that has since evaporated: “We have lived through a moment in which design came to seem like something besides what it was, like a business model or a virtue or a consolation prize. The sense of safety promised in its soft, clean forms begins to look less optimistic than naïve”, Molly Fischer asserts melancholically.

This situation is also reshaping the symbolic structures of graphic design culture. Among them, the studio: according to Elizabeth Goodspeed, “Whether you call yourself a studio or a person aren’t structural descriptors as much as they are a signal; shorthand for how a practice wants to be read. But when ‘studio’ no longer guarantees size, permanence, or authority, the mythology around growth starts to fall apart with it.” Graphic design criticism, as chronicled by Rick Poynor in his latest book, has shrunk to the point of near nonexistence. Finally, graphic designers are increasingly losing assignments to AI: in a survey conducted by the Norwegian Grafill, 48% of respondents said this had already happened. Once all these threads are lined up, one can’t help but wonder whether graphic design is coming to be seen as a mix of uncoolness, cringe and diminished value. It would be sad, but if that is the case, it may be better not to beat around the bush.

Doomscroll Forever, 2024.

More important, however, is graphic design’s relation to visual culture as a whole. If the simplified is the domain of graphic design, visual culture at large is irreducible chaos. Cracker Barrel’s old menu couldn’t have come out of a “proper” design school or a design agency, unless ironically – that is, as a signal of cultural awareness and distance, the way Kalman & co. used to do. Graphic design culture couldn’t have given us the Wikipedia logo (just compare it to the many redesigns proposed over the years, like this one. It couldn’t have given us punk zines, even though it later absorbed them through countercultural aspiration or plain cultural appropriation. It couldn’t have given us either Craigslist or Spotify, as web design and UX follow a different logic, even if there are now attempts to fold UX and UI under the overly broad banner of “digital design”. And even though it has produced, and continues to produce, countless bootlegs of it, it couldn’t have given us the MAGA hat. Enter the culture wars.

Trump New Roman

A comment on Reddit.

“Politically inert marketing moves are being labeled as political for opportunistic reasons”, notices O’Keefe, referring to the Cracker Barrel case. Vit agrees:

Instead, this is a political, social, cultural, and racial issue that has been amplified and blown out of proportion by the harrowingly divided factions – liberals vs. conservatives, left-wing vs. right-wing, and LinkedIn vs. X keyboard warriors – of the United States population made ever more acute by our current, fragile, and volatile collective state of mind within this specific moment in time.

The political polarization of design artifacts did not stop at logos. In what was called a “font coup”, Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, undid the transition from Times New Roman to Calibri that Antony Blinken introduced in 2023 under the Biden administration, a change aimed at improving accessibility, particularly for people with visual disabilities. Rubio’s argument for this “return to tradition”, inspired by Roman antiquity, was that Calibri didn’t make documents more accessible, so the change proved cosmetic and therefore ineffective, as well as costly. In this view, restoring Times New Roman would mean not only saving money, but also bringing back “decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work products”.

A chart by Lincoln Michel that didn’t age particularly well.

Rubio is not alone in believing that serif fonts convey authoritativeness. “I think there is enough evidence that says that serif fonts are taken more seriously than sans serif fonts in printed material. There’s a sort of authority that hangs on a serif font because of its place in newspapers”, said Sam Berlow, an expert in digital reading behavior. Danish type designer Sofie Beier agrees: “We’re not ready to give that up to the sans serif yet”. However, Rubio’s initiative was described as “sad and hilarious”, given the rationale behind Calibri’s design: the typeface was conceived for use on computer screens, with the aim of reducing the visual noise created by fonts such as Times New Roman.

The “sans serif-ization” of tech and fashion brands (source: Velvet Shark, 2020).

If Rubio’s argument sounds like a pompous specimen of anti-woke rhetoric, it’s not only because it is, but also because, as John Gruber notes, the New York Times wants it to sound that way: the reporters cherry-picked the memo and distorted an argument grounded in at least some numbers and metrics (such as the costs of accessibility adjustments to documents after Calibri) and turned it into a performative gesture driven by conservatism. Furthermore, it seems it’s not just the Trump administration that is rushed and politically opportunistic. Antony Blinken’s cable, titled “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin”, came across as more of a (late) branding move than an accessibility one, in line with Millennial aesthetics and fashion. Coming a few years after the death of the serif typeface – “c. 1455–2018”, according to Sarah Spelling – Blinken issued the order just as Microsoft, which had adopted Calibri as its default font in 2007, was planning to phase it out. While Rubio offered a debatable but at least transparent rationale for the decision, Blinken delegated it to a vaguely defined recommendation by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. As a result, some Foreign Service officers anticipated an “internal revolt”. Even the technical argument in favor of Calibri was considered dubious. For instance, Fred Shallcrass, type designer at Frere-Jones Type, argued that “Complicated serifs get a bad rap […] Newer screens are sharper, so it’s far less of a concern than it used to be. In some ways, this is a dated approach. This would’ve made more sense if it was 10 years ago”.

Modernist tiramisu. Tweet by @firstclassrice³, 2024

Amid these quick and precarious transitions, which render the entire political class impulsive, reckless and driven mainly by propagandistic aims, these words from Rob Horning, written in May 2025, sound prescient:

Fonts perhaps become more salient as they become the only thing that people are expected to play with when it comes to words, once it is drilled into everyone that it is required for efficiency and political conformity to let machines do all the writing and the editing and the “thinking”. We won’t have official authority to change what words mean on the page, but we’ll be encouraged to think that changing the way they look is really the best way to express ourselves.

“We’ll be encouraged to think that changing the way [words] look is really the best way to express ourselves”. Horning’s prognostication as an old meme (source unknown).

Off-White Supremacy

Sometimes, as in the Cracker Barrel case and in Calibrigate, politics uses graphic design and marketing opportunistically. At other times, the opposite happens: it is marketing that uses politics. That’s what Pantone did with its elected “Color of the Year 2026”, called Cloud Dancer, essentially an off-white presented as a “conscious statement of simplification” and a respite from “the cacophony that surrounds us”. Cloud Dancer is Millennial pastel taken to its minimalist extreme. Again Molly Fisher in 2020: “In explaining the appetite for colors that soothe, we might gesture vaguely in the direction of Now More Than Ever, anxiety, the news”. After the ineffective backlash against Sydney Sweeney and her “great jeans” American Eagle campaign, Pantone was obviously chasing controversy, something confirmed by Sky Kelley, Pantone’s president, who said, before a giggling audience, that they knew all too well the choice would ruffle some feathers.

Play-Doh for Pantone, marking the occasion of the Color of the Year 2026.

Ironically, many progressive commentators pointed out from the outset that it was a case of rage bait – and yet proceeded to take the bait, generating free advertising in the form of lectures, at times delirious, on the links between the color white, whiteness and white supremacy. They didn’t buy that the choice was “just not that deep”. One of the commentators, Kathy Pham, admitted that Cloud Dancer gave her an opportunity to put her degree to use, and went on to produce an extensive three-part video on the case. Somehow, this was a better job than that of Kaelen Van Cura, a jewelry designer who went viral (which is not always fun) arguing that “the original intent of minimalism was to erase culture” – and quoted Forbes to support her claim. Van Cura called Cloud Dancer a dog whistle, but if so, it’s a strange one, seemingly recognized as such more by its detractors than by its supporters.

Corporate Memphis

With Cloud Dancer, Pantone purported to transcend the murky terrain of politics. It did so in bad faith, fully aware that the color choice was to be read politically and would further polarize the political spectrum. This is how the calm, mindful off-white became yet another bullet in the culture wars. But what do the culture wars look like when viewed through the lens of design choices? Let’s briefly go back to Rubio’s font coup. Calibri was the default font of one of the so-called GAFAM, the five major U.S. technology corporations, and it was adopted by the Biden administration within a diversity campaign called “iCount”. What looked like a well-intentioned effort to improve accessibility was in fact deeply shaped by the imagination of the corporate tech world. At the root of this imagination lies an aspiration toward modernization and innovation, seemingly aligned with progressive aims, that is, the perfect Millennial cocktail: “The hipster was Vice; the millennial is virtue, or at least virtuous consumption”.

An example of Corporate Memphis style from Hinge.

At the typographic level, this imagination took the shape of same-same-but-different sans-serif wordmarks. Of course there is an ocean of difference between Google Sans and IBM Plex, just as there is between the logo of Balenciaga and that of Balmain, but to mere mortals, politicians included, the perception is one of homogenization, if not de-individualization (“The implications of sans serif on society reveals how we’re increasingly getting away from individuality, slowly falling into the sans serif abyss”, according to Madison Hsieh). But there is more: the sans-serif flattening of the world feels like the tip of the iceberg of processes that mere mortals have no clue about, yet can’t help wondering whether marketing experts and managers are bullshitting. Would they be so wrong? To make up your mind, just check the part dedicated to the “relativity of space and time” in the infamous Pepsi brand manual from 2008.

Detail from the 2008 Pepsi brand manual.

At the level of illustration, the corporate/tech imagination took an instantly recognizable form, variously labeled flat style, Alegria art or Corporate Memphis. This is how Wikipedia describes it: “Common motifs are flat human characters in action, with disproportionate features such as long and bendy limbs, small torsos, minimal or no facial features, and bright colors without any blending.” BUCK, the agency that developed the style for Facebook in 2016, explains: “The figures are abstracted – oversized limbs and non-representational skin colors help them instantly achieve a universal feel.” However, as argued by Ana Henriques, “in representing no one, [the flat style characters] can represent everyone. This is especially useful to corporations trying to have mass appeal. They are ethnically non-specific to represent a vague promise of diversity and, to avoid privileging any body type over another, they have a cartoonish one”. The scale of the criticism Corporate Memphis received testifies to its success; however, I believe its significance has been underestimated. Flat design became the visual language of corporate elitism with a human face, where “human” tends to align with conspicuous progressive values and displays of DEI, such as Lockheed Martin taking part in Pride. Like the Millennial Aesthetic, it was able to “take something disgusting and attempt – through sheer force of branding – to make it cute and fun”. The blatant opportunism and ethical contradictions conveyed by flat illustrations made it easy for the right to turn them into one of its preferred polemical targets.

From the Alegria Visual Guidelines booklet by BUCK: Corporate Memphis’s own “Modulor”.

Brad Troemel traces flat design back to Apple’s “victory over the physical world,” with flat interfaces replacing skeuomorphic ones. Like myself, he is perplexed by the association with the Italian Memphis group, including figures of the caliber of Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Alessandro Mendini, whose work was genuinely provocative and a novel response to the overseriousness of modernism. Flat design, by contrast, is “a tepid attempt to satisfy everyone that ends up pleasing no one”. In fact, as Michele Rosenthal suggests, flat illustrations are as much mid-century modern as they are eighties postmodern. For Troemel, flat illustrations are an evolution of stock photography, better suited to the task of identity representation than photos precisely because of their abstraction. After Facebook first, and later all major tech corporations, adopted it, smaller companies aimed at acquiring the same legitimacy, since the style was cheap and ready to be reproduced semi-automatically.

An example of a social media infographic carousel featuring flat-style illustration. @marjanilane⁴, 2024.

Troemel links flat illustration to two other artifacts connected to Millennial corporate aesthetics: social media infographics and sans-serif fonts. Generally progressive in content, social media infographics are not the kind of data-heavy infovisualization designers associate with the term, but bite-sized, pastel-coded moral lectures and workplace-etiquette checklists, popping up everywhere since ours is a world where the work knows no boundaries. In Troemel’s view, social media infographics are the result of two distinct phenomena, one political and one technical: the first election of Trump, the original shitposter president, and the introduction of Instagram’s carousel function. These infographics offer the promise of “political agency in the form of personal awareness”, but what they actually achieve is “overstating problems and understating complexity”. He concludes on a Benjaminian note: “infographics signify the transformation of politics into aesthetics”, an aesthetic dimension that is all the more temporary, fleeting, marked by the tempo of online virality. To convey the symbolic meaning of sans serif, Troemel goes on to imagine the suicide note of a flat-style illustration that can’t take it anymore in their pastel prison: “no it couldn’t have been written by hand, because hand gestures are too specific and a flat illustration’s hands couldn’t hold a pen anyway, […] it would be done in a sans-serif typeface because every company prone to using flat illustration after 2016 also released a sans-serif wordmark around the same time”.

An example of flat style put in the service of social justice. Illustration by pikisuperstar⁵.

Even graphic design culture stricto sensu jumped on the gentle-hued, flat ferry of Corporate Memphis. Extra Bold is a popular field guide for graphic designers, co-authored by seven people, including Ellen Lupton, one of the most prominent historians and critics of graphic design. The book is rooted in social justice, including chapters devoted to issues of identity and representation, as well as a substantial focus on class, labor disparities and wage gaps. The guide is meant to be introductory, but at times the tone echoes the same cheerful, workplace paternalism corporations use in their offices, treating polarizing issues and relatively new theories as if they were self-evident, with some rather blatant stretches (“The concept of a ‘type family’ is rather patriarchal”). Parts of Extra Bold indeed operate like social media infographics, that is, in Troemel’s words, “as the disciplinary emails from the Democratic National Committee HR department sent to the public”.

This tone is also conveyed by the graphics. Jennifer Tobias’s illustrations, which run through the book, are not exactly flat-style – if only because Corporate Memphis is not a single style but an amalgamation. While Tobias uses flat colors, the people she depicts are more fully characterized, with distinct facial traits and recognizable skin tones, sustaining the hope that “flat art and diversity can easily coexist when done right”. Yet some of the illustrations reveal the cosmopolitan worldview of the corporate imagination, in which every conceivable form of diversity is compressed into a single scene or even into a single figure – a Where’s Waldo of intersectional difference, held together by a homogeneous form. Godard’s old adage about making films politically comes to mind: while the content of the illustrations is conspicuously political, the politics of their form veers toward the corporate imagination.

“When is it discrimination?”, illustration by Jennifer Tobias in Extra Bold, 2021.

Now, the hypocrisy often expressed by corporations through flat style does not mean that flat style and flat-adjacent styles are inherently hypocritical. Still, this cultural association should be taken seriously, since innocent or seemingly neutral aesthetics have the capacity to catalyze passions and thus to become a target, an anti-flag. Indeed, the corporate-driven homogenization of illustration and typography has even led some bigoted, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to single out flat style, giving rise to labels such as “globohomo”, which resurface from time to time in comment sections. How should one oppose this? There is no way to know in advance the negative interpretations aesthetic may attract, but once a new meaning comes into focus, there is a responsibility to take it into account, and not shy away from pointing out the political associations buried in the designerly unconscious.

Google searches related to “corporate memphis”.

Serif Populism

In times of polarization, aesthetic associations with political values seep from the unconscious and spark visceral reactions that feel almost atavistic, as if tied to a primordial sense of good and evil. That good and evil being (of course depending on where you stand): on the one side, flat style and sans serif, the visual language of Millennial marketers and hip bureaucrats; on the other side, a return to tradition championed by down-home MAGA classicists, glad to wear the iconic four-word red-and-white baseball cap (itself a folk symbol) now accompanied by a glut of variations bearing slogans like “Trump 2028” and “Gulf of America” (Miami Vice-style). On the one hand, the Corporate Memphis of cosmopolitan tech companies; on the other, the Serif Populism of the Trump administration and its supporters. And, since the unconscious is irrational by definition (or, more precisely, non-rational), it hardly matters that both sides are riddled with contradictions: that, for instance, the CEOs of once-progressive tech companies now sit around a table extolling the current president, or that the old barrel is meant to evoke a local restaurant while in fact it belongs to a chain with more than 600 locations.

A recent sign in the White House, 2025 (photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times).

In the populist mindset, “serif” stands for tradition, regardless of whether that tradition is invented. It also stands for beauty, but understood as decoration, often cheap, as in the Oval Office. Thus, Serif Populism is a reaction to what is perceived as sans: sans soul, roots, history; sans decor or decorum. It is a reaction to a bland nothingness that “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever”. The culprit? Corporate simplification (which goes hand in hand with the modernizing style of graphic design – remember Hillary’s right-arrowed H?). Serif Populism presents itself as “honest work” made by “real folks” who are neither corporate drones nor branding experts.

Comment by @ifthenjim under a post about Calibri, 2025.

The etymology of the word “serif” is disputed, and there are many folk theories around it (my favorite traces it back to “sheriff”). There is, however, one particularly interesting conjecture, according to which the term is a back-formation, a linguistic invention meant to describe serif fonts retrospectively, that is, from the point of view of sans-serif ones: “Look what I came up with: a typeface devoid of those pesky wiggly protuberances, you know the ones… the serifs!” Serif Populism does something similar: it invents, prospectively, the poverty of sans, which is the misery of modernity. In Troemel’s words, “this antiplace [that] has none of the defining features that you would expect from a location, let alone the warmth of your favorite place”. To corporate pastel asepticism, Serif Populism opposes a highly adorned golden age of beauty. In this climate, the spurious heirs of William Morris proliferate. Among them is Sheehan Quirke, “The Cultural Tutor” on X, who wonders, in a YouTube video with 4.4 million views, why everything is so ugly now and where all the intricate beauty of a Victorian-era London lamppost has gone.

Parody frontpage of America by Design, 2025.

Just as Corporate Memphis doesn’t need to include fully flat illustration, but rather give off the vibe of the corporate imagination of the day (or lack thereof), Serif Populism doesn’t need to involve serif fonts to qualify as such. Like everything else, its typographic style is contradictory, not only rehabilitating Times New Roman but also indulging in Apple “Think Different” (or Reaganomics) nostalgia. Hence, the ubiquity of Instrument Serif, the Stranger Things of fonts, an open-source typeface used to launch Trump’s gold card. Elizabeth Goodspeed clears the timeline: “If Times New Roman calls to mind ’90s Microsoft Word and early 2000s CIA Interrogation Reports, Instrument Serif points a bit more backwards – toward Trump’s own 1980s aesthetic of luxury and excess, and a broader conservative nostalgia for that era’s corporate gloss.” Camila Curiel identifies the allure it can have on the Mad King: “Instrument Serif takes us back to a decade where everything was golden”.

Trumpian foam-core (photo: Mark Schiefelbein/AP).

Adding irony to irony, the person leading National Design Studio spurred by the “America by Design” initiative is none other than Joe Gebbia, a RISD alumnus and co-founder of Airbnb, who went fully pre-desktop era nostalgic to get the job: “He started with a traditional Keynote presentation, before learning that the government preferred big foam-core boards. He ended up carrying 20 of them at a time” (note to self: foam-core is perfect term for a graphic design-related internet aesthetic).The National Design Studio argues that the American nation is the biggest brand in the world and that the government should feel more like an Apple Store. Their early releases rely mostly on sans typography, AI-generated imagery and even a punkish icon version of the USA flag (“an attempt at modernism that lands closer to looking like a country in mourning”, according to Mark Wilson). “From what is visible so far, the National Design Studio isn’t functioning as a civic design program so much as an advertising agency for the administration and its policy goals. If one was feeling less charitable, they might simply call it a digital propaganda department”, concludes Goodspeed. This is how the ghosts of the corporate past become tradition, identity, soul and even what makes us human (“I myself am unequivocally guilty of this serif-as-humanity signaling”, wrote designer Keya Vadgama).

Trump Gold Card promotion featuring Instrument Sans, 2025.

Peters Fixes Pentagram

New hybrid figures emerge from the conflict between Serif Populism and Corporate Memphis. Among them is Allan Peters, a graphic designer and content creator with more than 700k followers on Instagram, who sits between modern corporate branding and a new breed of “honest work” brand design. Based in Minneapolis, Peters is a logo specialist who explains his design choices in warm, colloquial terms using pencil and paper: “We are a different kind of branding agency; built on authenticity not complacency, craft not indifference, integrity not insincerity”. His trademark videos are those in which he fixes existing logos, both classic and new, such as the one for the city of Austin designed by Pentagram’s DJ Stout in 2025. In this case, he seamlessly embraces “the people’s feedback” without questioning it (Pentagram’s logo reads autism?!) and positions his fix against the elite solution, deemed generic and distant. In a heretical move, he “improves” a colleague’s work – and he can do so because he is himself “the people”, as evidenced by his intense origin story.

Allan Peters, 2025.

The response of DJ Stout’s in Peters’s comments section is telling: “The majority of the tweaks Allan made would be thrown out because they don’t fit into the parameters established by the extensive research conducted well before any design began”. While I have no reason to doubt the veracity of Stout’s remark, I could not imagine a more blatant example of bureau-expert speak. This is why designers like Peters are not just design influencers: they are a refreshing “threat” to the late-modernist, faux-rational orthodoxy of branding, which is less about visual results and more about the rhetoric surrounding them. This exchange also gives us an insight into why nowadays every logo redesign is trashed online: it is because of the “reject modernity, embrace tradition” mindset, which we have seen played out in recent films like Bugonia and Eddington. Before it represents the brand, the redesigned logo stands for an aseptic, alien world detached from history and place. Somehow, it is the very idea of the logo that is now antagonized. It is as if Naomi Klein had gone all rogue and conspiratorial.

Design and Hyperpolitics

In a recent interview, German theorist Florian Cramer succinctly charts the contradictory sentiments that loom over the terrain of political conflict:

The discursive strength of contemporary fascism is that it superficially appears to alleviate over-complexity and un-accountability through its decisionism, while itself being inherently contradictory, irrationalist, and highly messy – often literally, like the interior of Boris Johnson’s car, or the outer appearance of Javier Milei. It promises populist diskarte instead of crapular technocracy. Precisely because of its subjectivism, which includes messiness and chaos, it appears to be a more grounded and honest form of decisionism and fascism than the abstracted decisionism and fascism of big data systems. It is a politics that can even be openly and ostensibly crapular without the crapularity appearing as failure.

We could map Cramer’s terms to the visual artifacts discussed in this text. First, we have the messy but honest subjectivism of Cracker Barrel’s old menu contra the expert over-complexity of the marketing firms they hired, translating to a bland, surface-level simplicity. Then, we have the blunt decisionism of Rubio with Times New Roman contra Blinken’s cosmetic introduction of Calibri. Flat-style illustrations serve as the conspicuously progressive veneer of a crapular technocracy – crapular because it is contradictory and fails often, as seen in platform “enshittification”. As I was writing in 2021, the risk was that social justice as a whole would be dismissed as elitist, alien, corporate – and this is exactly what happened: the baby became the bathwater (again, Bugonia). Serif Populism is equally contradictory and irrational, featuring the weird combination of state propaganda with brand references or the MAGA hat made in China; however, the failures and contradictions of Times New Roman policies are refashioned as folksy authenticity. Wherever you look, “chaos reigns”.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, 2017. Digital vernacular as abomination.

In her book Superstorm, Noemi Biasetton offers a useful categorization of the various ways in which design and politics interact. First, there is design with politics, meaning the design of political campaigns, such as Kamala Harris’s or, more recently, Zohran Mamdani’s. Then, design about politics takes politics as its subject, as in Jonas Staal’s 2018 critical retrospective of Steve Bannon. Finally, the design of politics involves “designerly ways of conceiving, creating and managing political communication without the declared presence of any designer recognized as such”.

The Maga Hat Hat, an actual product sold during the last Trump campaign. Someone on X called it “baudrillardesque”.

Often, in these approaches, the term “politics” is taken for granted, treated as if it still meant what it did for factory workers who went on strike in the last century. But politics is no longer what it once was: its meaning and role in society have changed dramatically. Anton Jäger, a historian of political thought, describes a trajectory that begins with the mass politics of the 20th century, a “strong, slow drilling through hard boards”, as Max Weber put it, which then becomes post-politics in the 1980s and 1990s, when the nihilist euphoria of consumption went hand in hand with the shrinking of civic life. From there, and through a long phase of populist antipolitics that still echoes today, we have arrived at the current hyperpolitics, a kind of terminally online caricature of 20th century politics, in which “everything becomes politicized and nothing gets accomplished”, or at least none of the people’s demands.

Kamala HQ account on X, including a brat-inspired cover image.

It seems as though the political sphere has shattered, like crystal glass. In this respect, Jäger recovers a useful distinction, that between politics and policies, where the former is the ongoing process of shaping a collective will, while the latter is the technical execution of that will. Beginning with Carl Schmitt, several authors such as Chantal Mouffe have provided similar distinctions, such as that between politics and the political. Among them is Jean-Luc Nancy, for whom politics is the arena of conflicting forces, while “‘the political’ seems to present the nobility of the thing – which thereby implicitly regains its specificity, and thus its relative separation”. Now that the nobility once associated with the political has largely eroded, attempts to invoke it tend to sound rhetorical, if not melodramatic.

Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008), a novel that traced the trajectory leading to our current hyperpolitical moment.

The design examples discussed above, each carrying a strong hyperpolitical charge often drawing on visual traditions other than graphic design, point to a dimension that precedes and overwhelms the political, namely culture. This dimension, which we might call pre-political, rests on an insight that can be traced back to thinkers like Antonio Gramsci or Pierre Bourdieu, but which, in its most concise and now widely circulated formulation, comes from the alt-right publisher Andrew Breitbart: “politics is downstream from culture”. As both Corporate Memphis and Serif Populism show, the terrain of political conflict has shifted to culture at large. In this sense, it is true, as leftists tend to repeat, that nothing is neutral and that everything is political. But everything is political because everything is cultural, politics included. In fact, the very statement “everything is political” has become a meme, carrying its own ideological undertone before functioning as a factual claim, if it ever did: it is situated within the political spectrum, not outside it. Sure, “everything is political”, but also: everything is romantic, performative male, Maduro, Evian, banana, Sabrina Carpenter… you name it. And beware, it goes both ways: if Sabrina Carpenter is political, then politics is Sabrina Carpenter, the singer who’s “creating a visual communication based in nostalgia for values from a past decade that are not aligned with the contemporary concept of womanhood”, according to the aforementioned reviewer of Instrument Serif. Remember that week’s special, which disappeared from the menu without a trace? That’s politics now. In Jäger’s words, “low-cost