What does timelessness in branding actually mean?
Designers, clients, and brands all ask for timelessness, but they rarely mean the same thing. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl breaks timelessness into four types—visual, functional, cultural, and brand—using examples like Dieter Rams, Apple, the NASA worm, and Rainier Beer. He argues the better test is why you’d want to redesign something today, and explains how clients who ask for timelessness to avoid risk often end up with generic brands that nobody remembers. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on timelessness, What the F*ck Is Timelessness?.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl sets out to define timelessness, noting that designers think about it one way and clients another. He identifies four types. Visual timelessness never looks dated, as with Dieter Rams and Apple. Functional timelessness keeps working as interaction changes, and ties to build quality. Cultural timelessness keeps creating meaning across generations, like the NASA worm logo. Brand timelessness is equity so core that changing it would destroy the brand’s expression.
He warns against fetishizing the past. The useful question isn’t whether something could have been designed yesterday, but why you would want to redesign it today. Parliament’s work with Rainier Beer, a 100-year-old company with a classic logo, is his example of something you can’t throw away.
Finally, he explains what brands really mean when they ask for timelessness: please don’t make me pay for this again in five years. That desire for lower risk often leads clients to strip out unusual type, colors, and messaging, producing generic brands. Trying to avoid looking dated, he says, can prevent a brand from becoming memorable.
Highlights
Timelessness can be visual, functional, cultural, or brand-based.
The NASA worm still defines NASA despite years out of use.
Ask why you would redesign something today, not whether it looks current.
Brands asking for timelessness usually want to avoid paying for a rebrand again.
Avoiding anything dated can stop a brand from being memorable.
Key insights
Timelessness has more than one meaning
Separating visual, functional, cultural, and brand timelessness helps teams see which kind they actually need, instead of defaulting to how something looks.
The redesign question is the real test
Asking what benefit a redesign would bring is a better measure of timelessness than asking whether a design looks new or vintage.
Timelessness requests are often about risk
Clients want longevity and lower investment, and the person running the project wants confidence they won’t look foolish to their organization.
Safe choices produce generic brands
Removing distinct type, colors, and messaging to avoid dating a brand also removes what makes it memorable. Calvin sees giving clients the confidence to be distinct as the designer’s job.
Detailed analysis
The clip reframes timelessness from an aesthetic goal into a strategic one. Most of the examples Calvin gives, from the NASA worm to Rainier Beer, earned their staying power through meaning and equity built over time, not through a neutral look.
That exposes a trap in how many rebrands are run. When clients measure timelessness only visually and designers follow, the work drifts toward the generic, and the brand loses the distinction that could have made it last.
Conclusion
Timelessness isn’t a measurable quality a design either has or lacks. In Calvin’s view, it comes from the distinction a brand creates, and chasing safety in its name usually works against it.
Transcript
What is timelessness? What does it actually mean? Why does it come up all the time? I think we all have an idea of what timelessness is, but I want to define it, because I think there are actually a few different categories of timelessness when we are talking about it. I think designers think about it one way, and clients and brands think about it another way. And I think somewhere in between, where all those mix, is where the truth is.
So when we’re talking about timelessness, I think there’s a visual timelessness. That’s the idea that it never looks dated, despite trends and despite changes in fashion. And that’s when you think of people like Dieter Rams and Apple products. You think of this guy and his stuff. We’ll talk more about Dieter Rams later, because I think there are also some downsides to thinking only about this side of it.
So there’s the visual side. There’s also functional timelessness: the idea that it continues to function despite changes in how we think about interaction. That’s digitally, physically, anything in the world. Functional timelessness is also related to build quality, those kinds of things. Some of those functionality aspects, we think of Apple products as well. They’re such a good example for this.
But there’s another type, cultural timelessness: the idea that it continues to find and create meaning across generations. One example of that I think is really interesting is the NASA logo, the classic NASA worm logo, which I don’t think I have open here, but let’s pull it up. This is the best version of it: Standards Manual. If you don’t know this website, it’s incredible. You can buy beautiful hardcover books of the brand standards from NASA and a bunch of other old classic brands. So NASA hasn’t actually used this mark in years, but it has stood the test of time, and it has become the mark that we actually think of with NASA, not the little blue globe that it currently is. It is truly this mark. It’s stood the test of time. It’s generated meaning for generations, and it’s great.
And then the last type of timelessness is the idea of brand timelessness, and that’s kind of like brand equity: the idea that something has grown so core to a brand that the brand’s expression would be destroyed if you changed it. Their brand equity would be destroyed if you changed it. So we’ll talk some more about some of these specific examples, like Dieter Rams and Braun products. I’ll talk about Pizza Hut, because we’ve talked about Pizza Hut a lot in these streams.
So I think one thing that’s worth thinking about is that there’s a tendency to fetishize the past when it comes to timelessness. Timelessness is often associated with a vintage or a historical look. But the idea that this could have been designed yesterday isn’t really helpful in assessing timelessness. The real question is, why would we want to redesign it today?
I think about that when you start asking it about a brand, especially at Parliament, because we do a lot of rebranding work. We actually just posted a really good insight on our insights blog right now. You can go to our website, and it’s a really good one about how we break down and think about different types of rebranding. So we do a lot of rebranding work, and I think it’s actually more helpful to ask the question: why would we want to redesign it today? What benefit do you even get from that? And I think that’s a better standard to start measuring a brand or a product’s level of timelessness.
We did this when we were working on Rainier beer. It’s a 100-year-old company with an absolutely classic logo. We’ll talk more about Rainier later, but I think that’s just a good example of how there are some things you can’t throw away, nor do you want to.
Actually, let’s start breaking down what people mean when they’re asking for timelessness. I’m sure this isn’t the end-all, be-all on timelessness, but these are some things that I regularly see and regularly think about, depending on who is asking about timelessness. So we’ll cover why brands ask for it, why designers want it, and why consumers want it or don’t want it.
So let’s start with why brands ask for timelessness. If you’re a designer and a brand comes to you, what they’re asking for when they ask for timelessness essentially comes down to: please don’t make me pay for this again in five years. Pay for this both financially and public-relations-wise. There are many ways that they have to pay for it when they do a rebrand, or when they’re just starting out a brand.
So to them, when a brand is asking for timelessness, they’re asking for longevity, lower investment over time. They’re asking for an accumulation of brand equity, and we’ll talk a lot about accumulation of equity and heritage later. But I think the one that actually scares people into focusing on the idea of timelessness too much is that it’s lower risk. Focusing on this idea of timelessness also instills a confidence in the brand that they won’t look foolish later. And I think there’s a deeper undertone in that: it builds confidence in the client specifically, the one running the project on the brand side, that they won’t look foolish to the rest of their organization. I think that’s one that really creeps up, and you start seeing it once you start presenting new directions for a brand. You start feeling that tension.
But what is usually happening there is that clients are often only measuring timelessness visually. They’re focusing on that visual category of timelessness. So what they end up asking for, and what many of us designers wrongly follow them in giving to them, is: we remove unusual type, we remove unique colors, eccentric or distinct visuals or messaging, and that just leads to really generic brands.
So that leads to the problem: trying to avoid becoming dated, or looking out of trend, can prevent you from becoming memorable. That’s the actual challenge right there. They don’t want to become dated. They don’t want to stick their neck out. But then that prevents you from actually becoming a memorable brand. And our job as branders and designers and strategists is to give them the confidence they need to be comforted with the idea of making a more memorable brand.
I know Aaron’s in the chat. We’ve definitely had this discussion about timelessness many, many times with clients, and it’s always a very difficult conversation, because a lot of people actually think there is a measurable amount of timelessness in something. And it’s actually more about the distinction you create, which we’re going to talk about a lot in a second.