What the f*ck is timelessness?
In this live episode of You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl takes on one of the most overused words in design and branding: timelessness. He breaks it into four kinds—visual, functional, cultural, and brand—then unpacks what brands, designers, and consumers each really mean when they ask for it. Along the way he looks at Dieter Rams and Braun, the classic NASA worm, Pizza Hut Classic, Sizzler’s revival, Dr. Bronner’s, black metal logos, Jaguar, Cracker Barrel, and Bob’s Red Mill, plus Parliament’s own redesign of Rainier Beer. His takeaway: timelessness is just accumulated meaning, designers can’t create it, and the only way to earn it is to be distinctive enough to risk looking dated first.
Outline
Summary
In this live episode of You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl asks what timelessness actually means. Parliament is a brand transformation agency in Portland, Oregon, that helps companies facing big changes become the next version of themselves through strategy, positioning, identity, and messaging. After quick studio news (a wrapped round of brand strategy work with Netlify and founder Chris’s motorcycle trip through Mongolia, Japan, and Korea), Calvin sets out to pin down a word that clients ask for, designers crave, and almost nobody defines.
Calvin starts by splitting timelessness into four categories. Visual timelessness never looks dated despite trends, as with Dieter Rams and Apple. Functional timelessness keeps working as interaction and build quality evolve. Cultural timelessness keeps generating meaning across generations, like the NASA worm logo, which hasn’t been used in years but is still the mark people picture. Brand timelessness is equity so core that changing it would destroy the brand. He also argues that the useful question isn’t whether something could have been designed yesterday, but why anyone would want to redesign it today.
He then looks at who is asking. For brands, a request for timelessness usually means “please don’t make me pay for this again in five years,” financially or politically, and it often leads to stripping out unusual type, distinct color, and eccentric messaging until the brand turns generic. For designers, it’s partly ego: the dream of making something important enough to end up in the books. For consumers, timelessness barely registers; what they want is familiarity without fatigue, built on memories that may come from the culture at large rather than their own experience. Round Table Pizza, Sizzler’s revival by the agency Tavern, and Pizza Hut Classic show how deep that shared memory runs.
From there Calvin lands on his definition: timelessness is simply accumulated meaning. If Coca-Cola launched today, nobody would call it timeless. Designers don’t create timelessness; only time does, though designers can build something that ages well. That makes heritage the real source of timelessness, which he illustrates with Parliament’s Rainier Beer redesign, where a century of history became the key differentiator and the team fought to give one whole side of the can to the big red R. For modernizing heritage brands, he points to Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle (most advanced yet acceptable): update the world around the brand’s core artifacts, because the most important artifact is the memory in the customer’s mind.
Calvin closes on distinction. Minimalism isn’t the answer; Dieter Rams’s work lasted because it was so distinct in its era, and Dr. Bronner’s, Wipeout, and Darkthrone prove that density and even illegibility can feel timeless too. To become timeless, a brand first has to look distinctive enough to become dated. A lively chat pushes the idea through Deafheaven, the Jaguar rebrand, Harley-Davidson, Cracker Barrel, Bob’s Red Mill, and Tropicana, and his final challenge is to push clients toward distinction over timelessness, then hold the conviction to maintain it.
Highlights
Timelessness comes in four kinds: visual, functional, cultural, and brand, and designers tend to fixate on only the first two.
The better test isn’t whether something could have been designed yesterday, but why anyone would want to redesign it today.
When brands ask for timelessness, they’re often asking not to pay for a rebrand again in five years, and chasing that safety leads to generic work.
Consumers don’t measure timelessness; they want familiarity without fatigue, often built on shared cultural memory rather than personal experience.
Timelessness is simply accumulated meaning, so a new brand can’t declare itself timeless, but it can build the elements that age well.
Heritage is a differentiator, not a liability, as Parliament’s Rainier Beer redesign showed with the big red R on one whole side of the can.
To become timeless, a brand first has to look distinctive enough to become dated, which is why distinction, not minimalism, is the answer.
Key insights
There’s more than one kind of timelessness
Calvin separates timelessness into visual, functional, cultural, and brand categories. Dieter Rams and Apple represent the visual and functional sides, the NASA worm shows cultural meaning that outlives a mark’s official use, and brand timelessness is equity so embedded that changing it would do real damage. Clients and designers often argue past each other because each is thinking about a different category.
Playing it safe is the fastest route to generic
Brands asking for timelessness often want lower risk, lower long-term cost, and the confidence that the person running the project won’t look foolish to the rest of the organization. Measured only visually, that request strips out the unusual type, unique color, and eccentric messaging that make a brand memorable. Calvin argues the agency’s job is to supply the conviction a client may not have.
Consumers want familiarity without fatigue
People don’t judge products by how timeless their design is. They respond to enough recognizable elements to feel at home, without being pushed to decode something entirely new. Those memories don’t even have to be their own: Calvin has never been to a Round Table Pizza and isn’t sure he’s ever been to a Sizzler, yet he can picture both, because the brands live in the cultural consciousness.
Timelessness is accumulated meaning
Coca-Cola would not be timeless if it launched today; it’s timeless because generations of meaning have built up around it. That’s why designers can’t create timelessness and new brands can’t claim it, any more than you can give yourself a nickname. What designers can do is build something with the elements it needs to age well.
Heritage is a differentiator, not a liability
Old logos, packaging, and advertising often look like baggage in a rebrand, but they’re the one thing competitors can’t copy. Craft breweries that faked rugged history fell flat because the heritage wasn’t real. On Rainier Beer, Parliament explored hundreds of directions, then reduced the can to its simplest form and dedicated one side to the big red R, a risky call that took many meetings and is now a defining moment for the brand.
Modernize the world around the artifacts
Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle (most advanced yet acceptable) means pushing a heritage brand right up to the edge of familiarity without crossing it. Sizzler and Pizza Hut Classic did this by keeping core artifacts like the logo and architecture while updating everything around them. The most important artifact of all is the memory of the brand in the customer’s mind, and the others exist to key into it.
To become timeless, first risk becoming dated
Minimalism isn’t the answer to timelessness; distinction is. Dieter Rams’s work endured because nothing else in its category looked like it, and Dr. Bronner’s text-packed labels and Darkthrone’s unreadable logo endure for the same reason. Innovation and timelessness overlap more than people think, which is why timelessness should feel a little scary to brands.
Detailed analysis
Calvin’s argument works because it reframes timelessness from a style into an outcome. Clients tend to treat it as a visual property they can buy, and designers tend to treat it as minimalism, but both views mistake the effect for the cause. By defining timelessness as accumulated meaning, Calvin moves the conversation from how something looks to how much memory, culture, and history it carries, which explains why a cluttered Pizza Hut with Tiffany-style lamps can feel as timeless as a Braun radio.
The episode also exposes the incentives behind the word. Brands want to avoid paying twice, and project leads want to avoid looking foolish internally; designers want to be remembered. Each of those motives pushes toward conservative choices that reference the past to predict the future, which is exactly what keeps a brand from becoming memorable. Calvin’s point that the future is unknowable, and that innovation can’t be measured with past data, is why he treats timelessness as an innovation challenge rather than a safety measure.
The chat-driven examples show both sides of the problem. Deafheaven stood out from black metal’s DIY aesthetic, then watched the category catch up, which suggests that once a distinctive brand lasts long enough, it has to shift from out-innovating others to holding firm on its own heritage. Jaguar took a huge leap that may restore its elite, couture standing, while Cracker Barrel, Bob’s Red Mill, and Tropicana show how clean, competent design can still throw away the cultural and brand value that made each one recognizable.
Conclusion
Everyone wants timeless design because it sounds easier and lower risk, but Calvin argues it can’t be created directly, and making it the target only ever leads to generic work. Timelessness is accumulated meaning, earned through heritage, scale, and time, and the role of design is to create something distinct enough to be worth remembering.
For brand leaders, designers, and strategists, the takeaway is to push for distinction over timelessness. Take the leap that feels scary, modernize the world around your most meaningful artifacts rather than discarding them, and then have the conviction to maintain what you’ve built. Great timeless design doesn’t ignore time; it defines a new present moment and lets heritage accumulate from there.
Transcript
Intro and studio news
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome to You’re Not the Audience. This is a weekly live show where I break down brands, products, subcultures, and all those things that stand out by not appealing to everyone. I’m Calvin, creative director at Parliament. We are a brand transformation agency that helps brands when they’re facing big changes, and we help them become the next version of themselves through strategy, positioning, identity, messaging, all that stuff.
Today is going to be fun. We are talking about what the f*ck is timelessness. It’s a word that comes up a lot in design and in branding. Clients ask for it. Designers crave it. So it’s going to be a real fun conversation. It’s going to be a lot of question asking, a lot of defining what timelessness is, but we’ll get into that in a second.
How’s everybody doing today? I see a couple folks in chat as everyone’s rolling in. Structure of the episode is like our normal episodes. We’ll talk a little bit of news—not a ton this week, we’ve just been wrapping up some projects. (Hey, Aaron’s in here.) Then we’ll talk a bunch about timelessness: what it means, what it isn’t, can it be created, all of that good stuff.
In Parliament news, it’s been pretty chill the last week or so. We just wrapped up some big projects with our client Netlify. I’ll share some stuff. We didn’t do their identity, but it’s helpful to see what they look like. We just wrapped up a big round of brand strategy work with Netlify. They’re going through some big, crazy, awesome growth right now, and they have always been a really important company in the web dev world. They have a great product, and it’s been really fun to work with. Insanely smart crew. Honestly, they run unlike any other Bay Area startup I’ve ever worked with. They’re very democratic, very smart, very on point. They ain’t blowing smoke. They just prove that they do good stuff, and they’ve done it for years. Really fun client. Maybe we’ll do some more stuff with them in the future. We’d love to. Really great crew there.
The only other fun news is Chris, the founder of Parliament, just got back. Last week I showed folks he was off in Mongolia doing a motorcycle trip, and he’s been telling us stories about his adventures. He went through Mongolia to Japan, to Korea. It was a big epic trip, and he took his 20-year-old son with him. If you want to look him up, his Instagram is kindandhumble, and I think he’s been posting a bunch of shots from that trip in his saved stories. The Mongolian steppe—there’s just no place that looks like it. There’s not a tree in sight, just big, beautiful rolling hills of grass. I can’t imagine riding motorcycles over it.
Four kinds of timelessness
All right, I think we should just get into it, because I’ve got a lot to cover today, and timelessness is a little bit of an amorphous subject. We’ll try to pin it down and see what we mean by it. So let’s start at the top. 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. Designers tend to think about it one way, clients and brands think about it another way, and somewhere in between, where those mix, is where the truth is.
There’s visual timelessness. That’s the idea that it never looks dated despite trends and despite changes in fashion. That’s when you think of people like Dieter Rams and Apple products—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.
There’s also functional timelessness: the idea that it continues to function despite changes in how we think about interaction, digitally, physically, anything in the world. Functional timelessness is also related to build quality, those kinds of things. With the functionality aspects, we think of Apple products as well. They’re such a good example for this.
Then there’s cultural timelessness: the idea that it continues to find and create meaning across generations. One example I think is really interesting is the classic NASA worm logo. Let’s pull it up. This is the best version of it: the 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. NASA hasn’t actually used this mark in years, but it has stood the test of time, and it has become the mark we actually think of with NASA. Not the little blue globe that it currently is. It is truly this mark. It’s generated meaning for generations, and it’s great.
And the last type is brand timelessness. That’s kind of like brand equity: the idea that something has grown so core to a brand that the brand’s expression, or its brand equity, would be destroyed if you changed it. We’ll talk about some specific examples, like Dieter Rams and Braun products, and I’ll talk about Pizza Hut, because we’ve talked about Pizza Hut a lot in these streams.
One thing 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 historical look. But asking whether 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? At Parliament we do a lot of rebranding work. (We actually just posted a really good insight on our blog right now about how we break down and think about different types of rebranding.) And I think it’s more helpful to ask why we would want to redesign it today. What benefit do you even get from that? That’s a better standard for measuring a brand or a product’s level of timelessness.
We did this when we were working on Rainier Beer. It’s a hundred-year-old company with an absolutely classic logo. We’ll talk more about Rainier later, but it’s a good example of how there are some things you can’t throw away, nor do you want to.
What brands, designers, and consumers really want
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 I regularly see and think about depending on who is asking for it. We’ll cover why brands ask for it, why designers want it, and why consumers want it or don’t want it.
So why do brands ask for timelessness? If you’re a designer and a brand comes to you asking for timelessness, what they’re asking for essentially comes down to: please don’t make me pay for this again in five years. Pay for it both financially and in terms of public relations. There are many ways they have to pay for it when they do a rebrand or when they’re just starting out a brand.
So when a brand is asking for timelessness, they’re asking for longevity and 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 the thing that actually scares people into focusing on timelessness too much is that it’s lower risk. Focusing on timelessness also instills confidence that the brand won’t look foolish later. And there’s an even deeper undertone in that: it builds confidence in the specific client running the project on the brand side that they won’t look foolish to the rest of their organization. That one really creeps up once you start presenting new directions for a brand. You start feeling that tension.
What’s usually happening there is that clients are only measuring timelessness visually. They’re focusing on that visual category. So what they end up asking for, and what many of us designers wrongly follow them in giving them, is: we remove unusual type, we remove unique colors, eccentric or distinct visuals or messaging. And that just leads to really generic brands.
That leads to the problem: trying to avoid becoming dated can prevent you from becoming memorable. That’s the actual challenge. They don’t want to become dated. They don’t want to stick their neck out. But that prevents you from actually becoming a memorable brand. And our job as branders, designers, and strategists is to give them the confidence they need to be comfortable 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 think there is a measurable amount of timelessness in something. It’s actually more about the distinction you create, and we’re going to talk about distinction a lot in a second.
But let’s also look in the mirror for a second. I’m a designer. Why do designers want timelessness? (I can talk today, I promise.) A big part of it is that there is an ego component at play. We are makers, and to be timeless is to make something important. Designers don’t dream of making a super-effective banking brand or a gigantic insurance company brand, the best of this year. We don’t really think about that. When you’re coming up, you’re being educated on the legends of the industry. You’re looking at Dieter Rams, guys like that, and the dream is to be in the books like the legends we were all educated on. So it’s a form of immortality. But that actually ends up leading to conservative decisions, because the future is unknowable, and at that point you’re usually referencing the past to try to predict the future. That’s not exactly how creating a memorable brand works. So you’ve kind of got to get over yourself a little bit. Do what’s best for the client, and you’ll be in better shape.
One other thing we always need to remember is that in the end, our job as brand strategists, as designers, is to help our clients make more money. It’s very uncomfortable, and I feel like we often don’t like to talk about it like that, but that is our job.
So then we have to ask: what does timelessness mean to consumers and customers? Honestly, I think consumers largely do not give a shit about the idea of timeless design. It’s just not how they measure the value of a product. I think they’re measuring it more as familiarity without fatigue. What I mean by that is there are just enough elements that are recognizable about the brand that they understand it and have memories attached to it, but it doesn’t push them to the point of having to figure out something completely new, something completely novel. There’s leeway in how far you can push that newness, how much you can test the bounds of that fatigue with a customer.
But it is worth remembering that timelessness is always related to memory. And memory comes from years of investment, generations of investment over time. That’s the safest way to generate timelessness. One thing that’s really important to remember is that a person’s memories about a brand may not even be their own memories. They might just be created from a larger perception of the brand that exists in the zeitgeist. We all have opinions about a lot of brands that we don’t have a personal attachment to, or even personal experience with, but we have some knowledge and understanding of them on a cultural-consciousness level. And our job as a brand is to keep affirming that memory they might have heard of.
The other day I went by an old abandoned Round Table Pizza location. I don’t even know if they really exist anymore. I’ve never been to a Round Table Pizza, but I can see it in my mind. I can experience it in my mind. I think of a certain type of place, a buffet, all those kinds of things. (I’m definitely going to talk about Pizza Hut in a minute, because that’s a place I have been.) I don’t know anything about the Round Table Pizza brand, but something has been established inside my mind. Round Table’s due for a comeback, right? They’ve got to be coming back. Does anyone in chat know if Round Table Pizza actually exists? There used to be one down the street by the bar I go to regularly, but it’s been gutted in the last couple years.
So the important thing from the consumer perspective is that repeated exposure to a brand starts creating familiarity, and familiarity is at the core of confidence building.
Oh, Sarah’s in here: they’re still out there, just in the burbs. Okay. Sarah, let’s go to a Round Table Pizza someday. Or Aaron, let’s do a company trip to a Round Table. [laughter] I don’t think we’ve ever done a Parliament trip to a buffet. Maybe that’s a thing we need to do.
Sizzler and shared memory
Okay, so that’s kind of what timelessness means to consumers. I’d be curious if anyone can think of other old classic brands like Round Table Pizza. I feel like there are a ton of brands like that that are ready for a renewal. Throw them in the chat.
One I love recently: Tavern, the agency in New York. I’ve been loving everything they’re doing. They just redid Sizzler’s brand, and talk about a brand no one has thought of in forever. They did a great job of digging up their heritage. I’ll pull that up really fast while I’m talking about it. This is the Tavern website. I love the way they think about this stuff. I know I’ve talked about their stuff a lot—they did the Hyper Blast energy drink, the energy booze I’ve talked about. They did a really good job of going back, digging up the original logo, taking a bunch of different elements from old advertisements, and then modernizing the world around it. I think that’s really critical to how you bring back timelessness for a brand.
I mean, look at this. This is incredible. I want to go to this place so bad. Some surf and turf. They pulled out all these old advertisements with this weird fuzzy logo version. It’s great. Oh god, all brown food. Maybe we don’t need to go to Sizzler. [laughter] My diet and health life is falling off just looking at this stuff. Incredible work.
I think this is such a great example. A lot of us have not even been to a Sizzler, because they haven’t been super relevant in decades. But we all have something rooted in our minds that has created familiarity over generations. And that’s at the core of confidence. Now that it looks nice and new and still has these old pieces, I’m very interested, because that familiarity gives me confidence that something good’s going on there.
Oh, Sarah says Sizzler was her favorite as a kid. Yeah, I actually don’t know if I’ve ever been to a Sizzler. That’s another place I don’t know if I ever went. I grew up so poor that it was the fancy dining option, so I don’t think we ever went there.
Timelessness is accumulated meaning
So those are some of the ways that the different groups we regularly talk to as branding people look at timelessness: the brand perspective, the designer perspective, the consumer perspective. That really asks: what is it? What are people actually asking for when they want something to look timeless?
Timelessness is simply accumulated meaning. That is it. It is just accumulated meaning over time. A way to think about that: imagine if Coca-Cola launched their logo and product right now. Absolutely iconic brand. We all know it. But if they launched it right now, could we say it’s timeless? No, not at all. It’s just a new product that launched, even if it still looks pretty distinct from everyone else. It’s only timeless because there have been generations of meaning accumulated with it.
I think it’s important to humble ourselves as designers and remember that designers do not create timelessness. Only time does. But designers can create something that ages well and create the necessary elements to age properly. That’s where design can come in.
And now I’m just thinking about Sizzler. I’ve got to close this window on my other screen. I’m staring at steaks and shrimp, and [laughter] I’m going to have a decadent lunch right after this. How long until I can go to Sizzler?
Dieter Rams and Pizza Hut Classic
Okay, let’s talk about some fun examples of timelessness. Like I said, there are those categories: visual, functional, cultural, and brand timelessness.
Dieter Rams—absolutely legendary. His ten principles of good design, his manifesto. This is Vitsœ, the company he worked with after he designed all the Braun products. There are a bunch of examples of Braun products in here, which went on to influence basically all of the design of Apple products. Speaking of timeless, this manifesto is good forever. He has one really specific principle in here that relates to timelessness, principle number seven: good design is long-lasting. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years, even in today’s throwaway society.
There’s a ton to pick apart in there, in a good way. The biggest element is what he means by “today’s throwaway society.” A lot of the other principles focus on less design, better quality, and design that benefits the environment, and those elevate why he’s talking about a throwaway society. But one problem is that designers focus only on the visual or functional categories of timelessness, which is why we all absolutely fawn over Dieter Rams. His stuff is beautiful. It’s simple. But there are reasons it became so popular that are outside of the idea of timelessness. We’ll talk more about that in a second.
The other great example, because it’s important to remember that timelessness is not just aesthetic—or at least not just a minimalist, clean, less-is-more aesthetic—is Pizza Hut. I’ve shown this on here before: Pizza Hut Classic. They’ve been bringing back the classic Pizza Hut restaurants, and there are a couple hundred of them across the country. Still not one in Portland, which breaks my heart. As soon as there is one, we are all going. That’s going to be our company trip. They’ve got salad bars. They’ve got the classic Tiffany-style lamps. Beautiful.
I think to be really great at branding, you need to be keyed into this type of timelessness as well, which is deep cultural and brand timelessness. This stuff is not pretty. It’s not less is more. It has almost none of the principles Dieter Rams talks about. Yet it is just so beautiful, so good. We all have memories of it. Even if we haven’t been to Pizza Hut, there’s something ingrained in our zeitgeist where we have an idea of what a pizzeria with a salad bar in it means. It’s easy for us as designers and branders to focus on that beautiful, austere Germanic or Swiss design in the Dieter Rams style, but it’s worth remembering that this is also incredible branding. Oh god, so much salad dressing. Look at that place. Absolutely legendary architecture.
All these photos, I think, were taken by Noah Kalina. If you don’t know Noah Kalina, he’s a very fun, very popular photographer. I’ll post his stuff up here. It’s funny that he took these photos of Pizza Hut, because he’s really known for the project where he photographed his face every day for many, many years and then animated it all together. But he has a ton of really thoughtful, artful projects. He apparently photographs a lot of chicken eyes—I think these are all eyes of chickens he owns. He’s an interesting photographer. I really love his stuff. He does a lot of this repetition—the German school of photography. Same form, different location.
So Pizza Hut is a reminder that timelessness can be that level of cultural and deep brand timelessness. We all have generations of accumulated meaning behind Pizza Hut and brands like that: Round Table Pizza, Sizzler. I don’t know why I’m thinking all about restaurants, but those are the places.
Can a new brand be timeless?
All of these are older things. Who knows how long Pizza Hut’s been around, but it’s been a long time. Dieter Rams and Braun was the ’60s, ’70s, early ’80s. The NASA worm was the ’70s. So that asks the question: can a new brand be timeless?
No, not really. Maybe—probably not, though. I don’t think you can create a new brand that gets the feeling of timelessness we often talk about. That comes up all the time when you’re working on a new brand with clients or organizations, where they ask for timelessness, and it’s like, you’re a brand-new startup. That’s just not possible. But we can create something with the aspects needed to become timeless. You just can’t declare it as timeless. You can’t say it’s a classic. That’s like giving yourself a nickname, which we all know is not cool.
Heritage and Rainier Beer
What that points us to is that if a new brand can’t necessarily key in on timelessness, that’s probably because timelessness just is heritage. That’s where the authentic timelessness comes from.
For example, let me pull this up: when we redesigned the classic Rainier Beer logo and packaging, we had something that new beer brands just don’t have, and that is time. We had over a century of time behind Rainier. They’ve had some form of this classic big red R logo for well over a hundred years. Their brand at large is a classic regional, playful, irreverent outdoor brand. They’re about the myth of the Northwest. But aesthetically they’ve always been this really beautiful, simple blank canvas that just has the mountain hidden away in here. It’s the big red R. It’s great.
When we think about what heritage means in this, it’s all that stuff: the old logo, the old packaging, the old advertisements, over a hundred years of history. I think a lot of people think those are liabilities when doing a rebrand. But actually, those are our key differentiators. Those are differentiators that no competitor can take away from us or replicate. That’s why, when there was the huge explosion of craft breweries and they tried to do the old, rugged, historic thing, it just felt fake. You’d see a beer that was established in 2019, and you’re like, you don’t have the years of heritage to back that up. You are faking the history.
So when we designed Rainier, I think we’ve actually got a fun photo in here. Let me see if I can find it. Oh, here’s a great photo. We did hundreds of designs that took the brand and the packaging—(damn it, Aaron. Okay, Logan. I’ll explain the Logan story another time)—we did crazy explorations. We went wild with the cans to push the limits of where it could actually go, and we ended up finding that reducing everything back to the simplest form of the Rainier can to ever exist was the way to go. Include the key elements. We redrew the logotype. Cleaned up the can. Dramatically simplified it. Went super white, and made one side of the can just the big red R, which is their most memorable thing.
Putting the big red R on just one side of the can was a huge debate with the client, because it’s scary. It’s risky. It’s not even the name of the company—one whole side of your can is just the mark. That took a lot of meetings to get through, and now everyone gets it. It’s a huge moment for them. They’ll do a redesign someday—it’s been a few years—but it would blow my mind if they took away the big red R on one side of the can and on the side of the package. It took a lot of debate to do that. That’s the kind of thing I was talking about: it’s our job to instill confidence in the client when they might not have it. We need to have conviction that the client doesn’t always have.
So that was a great win, and I love this one. The reason I also like it is that it looks nice. It’s simple, but it’s not overly designed. It doesn’t look designy. It looks like a classic beer. And that was the biggest challenge: how do you create something that is undesigned and just has that timeless heritage in it?
So that’s what timelessness really is. It’s accumulated meaning. It’s an expression of heritage and meaning generated over generations.
Raymond Loewy and MAYA
That asks the question, especially for clients working on rebrands: are innovation and modernization possible with heritage brands? Can you do completely new things?
I abide by a principle I really love. Let me pull up this guy. It’s by legendary designer Raymond Loewy. Look at him. What a dapper fella. I feel like it should become a rule that we all need these little mustaches if we work in branding and advertising. He was a mid-century designer, and he created a principle called MAYA: most advanced yet acceptable. I think that is how you approach innovation in heritage brands.
What that’s talking about is that in order to modernize a brand, you want to push it right up to the edge of familiarity. You want to think about how far you can go without destroying that history and that brand equity. You want that familiarity-without-fatigue aspect.
This is just calling out my favorite piece by Raymond Loewy, the Newman logo, a French clothing company from the ’60s. Incredible logo. Who in the chat knows this? What’s it called when you can rotate a logo and it says the same thing upside down as it does right side up? Not a palindrome… amb-something. Somebody look it up for me. But beautiful, simple logo. It did a great job for them.
So to modernize, you want to push right up to that edge of familiarity. Sizzler was a great example. They updated a lot of the world around the brand but kept the core artifacts in the middle the same. I think as designers and branding agencies, our natural rebranding instinct is to change all the old artifacts: the logo, the colors, the type, the old messaging, all of that stuff.
Oh, okay. Sarah said, “I think you got it with amb.” Ambigram. Sweet, that’s it.
We forget that all of those old artifacts are tied to the most important artifact of all, and that’s the memories of the brand in the consumer’s mind. That is an artifact in there. That’s brand equity, but it’s deeper than brand equity. It’s cultural importance embedded in their minds. So remember that it’s an important artifact of your brand, and you need your other artifacts to key into it. Modernize the world around those artifacts, but not necessarily the artifacts themselves.
Pizza Hut is a great example of that. They kept the classic logo. They went back to the classic architecture for the restaurant. All of those are really important artifacts that key into the artifact in our minds: the joyful experience we associate with those places.
Distinction, not minimalism
The thing to remember is that minimalism, austere design, less is more—none of those are necessarily the answer to timelessness. Minimalism is not the answer. It’s really about distinction. Distinction is the answer to creating timelessness.
You need designs to be durable. You need to make sure they replicate well in various places. That’s why in the 2000s, when everything was getting gradients slapped all over it, it wasn’t easily replicable in a lot of situations, so it inherently had to be updated over time. That’s some old-man thinking right there, but that’s how it worked out.
So if minimalism isn’t the answer, distinction is. And that reminds us that in order to become timeless, you first have to look distinctive enough to become dated. That’s the scary part. It feels like a deep shower thought, or a deep stoner thought: to become timeless, you have to look distinctive enough to become dated first.
That’s the thing we forget with timeless brands. All designers love Dieter Rams, but we forget that his style of minimalism was timeless only because it was so damn distinct and unique in its product category in that era. Nothing else looked like it. It was a freak designed for freaks, and that is why it stood out. His last principle: good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better. Just the most simple, beautiful things. It had these big knobs, which goes into the functional type of timelessness. His brand of minimalism works great, but timelessness wasn’t necessarily his focus. It was good design that lasts, but it was so distinct that it had to stand out. He hasn’t made these products in decades, and we’re still obsessed with them.
Dr. Bronner’s, Wipeout, and black metal
Another good example of minimalism not being the answer is Dr. Bronner’s. Incredible. It looks classic, like it’s always existed. I mean, it has existed for a long time. It is absolutely slammed with text. There are religious writings on it, all this new-age, hippie, spiritual stuff all over it. It is packed with every single possible piece of information, and it is so good. Some of the best branding ever. And it’s always the same. That’s their approach on everything. Let’s see if I can get this image here. It’s a super consistent system, everything is packed with information, and nothing else looks like it. That’s why it feels timeless.
This extends to a lot of other worlds too. We’ve talked about video games in here, and we’ve talked about Wipeout a lot. I love it. The Designers Republic did that work for Wipeout, the video game. Nothing else looked like it at the time, and that’s why we remember it. I still have the book sitting around somewhere.
It also applies to larger categories. We’ve talked about metal in here. I love metal and black metal bands. All those bands have black metal logos that look like gibberish to people. But that was really deliberate, to establish a distinction from pop music. We want to be unreadable. It’s about being in the know and discovering all this really extreme metal. A lot of the original bands, like this one here, Darkthrone, one of the big, important early black metal bands—nothing else looked like it. That was how they created the aesthetic, and now there are a billion bands that have taken that aesthetic forever. (And for any hardcore black metal people that watch this, I know Darkthrone wasn’t the first black metal band, but they became critical to it.)
So it really has always been about this: to create timelessness, you need to put your neck out and create a distinction that separates you from your whole category. You need to start thinking in a way that your category is not thinking. That’s the scary part. That’s why clients get really concerned about the high risk of it, the lack of confidence. We’ve talked about this before: it’s actually an innovation challenge to become timeless, and innovation can’t be measured, because you can’t measure unknowns in the future when you don’t have past information on them.
That’s why timelessness actually should be scary to brands, and that’s good. Our old Parliament motto, “Be brave. Stand apart.”—that is a timelessness challenge. There’s a really interesting thing where innovation and timelessness are essentially Venn diagrams that overlap. We think of them as opposites, but the only way to create a truly timeless brand is to step up above everyone else in your category. The real thing that’s required from the brand, and this is the challenge, is something we can’t always be directly part of as branding agencies.
When the category catches up
Oh, sweet, David’s in here. David Van Vine asks: is there a point where the subcategory culture gets so large that you then need to differentiate from there? Now so many metal logos look the same. Do you see anything where it suddenly goes mainstream?
Yes, that’s a great example, and it happens with everyone. It happened with millennial branding. We had 20 to 25 years where the idea for millennial branding was: take an overlooked product no one cares about, build a lifestyle brand around it, make it look a certain way, and boom, you make millions, get investments, and then Colgate or Johnson & Johnson buys your bespoke toothpaste brand.
You see it in metal too. For anyone who doesn’t know, there’s a very popular band named Deafheaven. They’re a black metal band—people put them in post-metal if you want to get artsy. First of all, they have short hair. A guy with short hair in a metal band? Not allowed. And their whole design aesthetic was very different, very beautiful, very simple, which stood outside the genre. They blew up huge. It’s funny, because now I think they’ve kind of gone the other way, proving, “No, we’re still hard, guys. We’ve got some darkness.” But their first couple albums—Sunbather is probably their most popular—had this really beautiful aesthetic that was way more modern than anything in the DIY metal scene.
So yeah, you’re totally right, David. At some point you step up, people start catching up to you, and then you might have to do something to poke your head above that. What it means is that the needle has moved, and other brands have a chance to step up to it. The challenge for a brand, once everything has caught up to you, is that you need the conviction to stick with your heritage. You’re no longer an innovative brand at that point. You have deep ties to your history, and you have to stick to that.
Oh god, I realize I’m not sharing my screen. So sorry. This is the Sunbather album by Deafheaven. It’s very clean, very simple—not an aesthetic any other band in the black metal scene was doing at the time. And this is what I was joking about: their singer has short hair. You’re not allowed to be a handsome man with short hair who screams a lot in a metal band. [laughter] I mean, he still looks weird. You’ve got to look a little weird to be in a metal band.
But that’s a great example. At some point everyone catches up with you, and you have to start doubling down on the conviction of your own heritage, because you’re not going to out-innovate the new innovators that caught up to you, or the ones that extend beyond where the category caught up. So if you’re lucky enough to last that long, I think you always have to become a little bit of a heritage brand.
Jaguar, Harley-Davidson, and Cracker Barrel
Any thoughts on this stuff? I’m curious if anyone has a bead on brands that are out now that they think are going to become timeless. It’s really easy to call out ones like Fender guitars—I’ve got guitars sitting around me in here—but it’s really hard to pinpoint which brands we think will become timeless and what they’ve done that stands out.
David asks: is it fair to say that in some ways, if you’re the market leader, you hold steady and keep that recognizability going? And Sarah brings up the Jaguar rebrand and Everlane. I think that’s an interesting question. It obviously depends on the brand, but I usually think you hold steady on the conviction of your brand, while still requiring some level of product innovation behind the scenes. That product innovation just has to align with the conviction behind your brand.
But oh dang, the Jaguar rebrand. Let’s pull that up for anyone who hasn’t seen it. That was a very dramatic one. We all know Jaguar. They updated their logo to look like this, and everyone absolutely dogged on it. They went from this to this. Does anyone know if they switched back? There was so much hate for it. I don’t even know how to find Jaguar cars—I’m not fancy enough for this. Oh, no, they stuck with it. Good.
Honestly, David, I think you’re totally on point. I hate this little J mark. Something about it is not elegant. But the wordmark of Jaguar, I think, is incredible. Sarah says, “Why would you change that from a sick-ass panther?” I agree. I do wish there was still a sick-ass panther somewhere in this. But with the actual type, I think they did a really great job. And they went with crazy stuff like this, where they turned Jaguar into a couture fashion brand, and nothing has ever looked like it. They really stuck their necks out there.
Oh, sweet, Fuel in the Tank—Ryan’s here. Ryan’s a big car guy. [laughter] I haven’t looked at the cars. These are insane. What is happening? Whatever’s going on in this is cool. But see, this is forever the bummer of cars right now. Look at this. This is incredible. What in the Total Recall is happening here? It’s complete innovation, an insane concept car. So cool. But then you go to this, and what breaks my heart is how all cars look like the same rounded blobs. Even the F-Type is cool, but it just looks like another blob car, at least in my opinion. Maybe the car folks disagree.
What did David say? “Goes right to the name of the show. So much of the hate online is from people who are not the audience.” Oh yeah, I think you’re right. Jaguar is an elite brand. They’re not going to say this, but their brand needs to be gatekept a little bit. They’re a luxury brand. They’re purposefully not for everyone, and that’s great. Oh man, I’ve got so many car nerds in the chat now. I love this. I don’t know anything about cars, but that’s such a good call on the Jaguar rebrand. It really went somewhere no one else has gone.
Ryan says the current Jag doesn’t really have an identity when so many other brands do it better with more prestige, and if they didn’t do a full reset, it was going to continue to struggle. Yeah. Still, Sarah’s onto something. I do wish they still had a sick-ass jaguar, or a cool jaguar image somewhere. Does anyone know if they have one? I feel like they’ve got to be hiding a cool panther head somewhere in there. David says that was a major part of their brand, and they’re really messing with one of their major design elements. Yeah. I think they’re doing interesting stuff, but I do hate this. This kind of mark just feels like somebody said, “Make it look like a Chanel or a Tory Burch logo.” That part bums me out.
David says Harley tried to do the same thing and completely failed. They tried to jump from an old generation to a younger generation. Yeah, it didn’t work for them. Oh, I realize I’m not sharing my screen again. I’m not on top of it today. This is the Jaguar mark I was talking about. I’m not a huge fan. It’s cool because it’s unique in their world and pretty distinct, but I don’t know if it’s the kind of distinct that has long legs.
The Harley one is interesting. I understand why they tried to modernize, but Harley is so core to them that you kind of need to be this busted, old, gritty biker. There’s a romance to that—the open road. You need to be a little rough around the edges to be a rebel in the way they are, because to go modern and clean is to remind us of our nine-to-five jobs, and the nine-to-five is the villain in Harley’s brand. Everything is against the status quo and the nine-to-five.
Sarah says the Jaguar mark feels like they’re going for Chanel. It definitely feels like Chanel. And Fuel in the Tank says rebranding a Middle America–focused brand must be hell—Cracker Barrel comes to mind. Oh, Cracker Barrel. Honestly, I feel like we should just do a whole episode about Cracker Barrel and the absolute botch job they did. They just threw away everything that made Cracker Barrel feel like Cracker Barrel. It was nice design. They simplified. It was good from a design standpoint, but terrible from the standpoint of timelessness measured in cultural and brand value. Absolutely terrible.
Final thoughts
It’s final thoughts time. This is great—awesome chat about all this stuff. We all want timeless design. It sounds easier. It’s lower risk. It’s important. But it can’t be created, and attempting to create it always leads to generic design. When that is the target, it will only ever lead to generic design. Cracker Barrel, perfect example.
This is a challenge for myself, and how I’d like to start approaching the discussion of timelessness with brands: in order to become timeless, you have to create something incredibly distinct. Distinct enough that it’s worth remembering. The only way you do that is by putting your neck out, taking a leap you’re really scared to take as a brand. And the follow-through required by the brand is the conviction to keep maintaining it.
Jaguar is an interesting example, because they maintained their heritage for so long under a certain aesthetic and then made a big leap with it. I think the leap is maybe going to work out. I don’t know how sales of Jaguar are doing, but the leap at least felt like they moved into the elite couture brand they were once associated with. Their brand dropped off at some point and wasn’t as important, so they pushed up to an identity that actually matched the heritage people thought of them as having.
What’s Sarah say? “Stop taking the men out of our logos. I’m looking at you, Bob’s Red Mill.” Yes. Men have it so hard—they’re getting removed from all our logos. And David says, “In some ways, timeless comes from scale, not design. It becomes timeless because it is known.” Absolutely. There’s probably a whole other side to this, that timelessness is only created by marketing, but that’s a whole other discussion.
Bob’s Red Mill and Tropicana
I’m already over time, but Sarah brought up Bob’s Red Mill, so we’ve got to talk about that really fast. Let me find it. It was on the UnderConsideration blog. Here we go. By the way, if you’re a designer and you aren’t paying the small annual fee to subscribe to UnderConsideration’s Brand New, you should do it. It’s incredible.
So, Bob’s Red Mill. I actually love the new type. I think it’s beautiful. Nice and simple. It modernizes it and still has some nice old charm. They actually still have Bob on the packaging, and it’s not a bad illustration. They kept him around, but it kind of bums me out that this is all that’s left of Bob. Sarah says he looks like Red Robin. Sick burn, maybe.
I think the packaging’s fine. It looks a little too modern in my eyes. But it bums me out that the image of Bob has been relegated to a fluff element. I honestly think it should be more important. I think the Bob image should essentially be a violator. On consumer goods packaging, a violator is the kind of thing that says “30% more” really big—a big thing that draws your eye and stands out. I feel like that’s what Bob should be, because that is their identity: it was owned by a guy who created this amazing mill, and it’s now an employee-owned company. It has conviction behind it. So good.
David says it’s too modern on packaging, way less distinct, and it kills the recognizability, and recognizability is massive in CPG. Yeah, it kind of killed a lot of that. There’s definitely some charm to the old one. Fuel in the Tank says “Bob the Violator” may be problematic. Yep. That’s what would be listed in the brand guidelines.
All right, I think we really covered some stuff today. That was great. Go support UnderConsideration’s Brand New. I love it. So that’s it: focus on creating distinct things, not just on timelessness. Challenge our clients to push for distinction over timelessness, because that’s how it’s created. And the last little thing in my mind is that great timeless design doesn’t ignore time. It defines a new present moment and then accumulates heritage and history over time. You need scale, you need that.
Oh, Aaron, Tropicana. Why are you guys mentioning all these good things? This is great. The Tropicana redesign was so funny. I’m just going to be distracted looking all of these up. Let’s see if I can find some imagery. Yeah, Tropicana. They did the new mark, and this one I’m actually torn on. The packaging has a unique aesthetic compared to a lot of folks, but it feels generically modern, and the icon of the straw inside the orange is one of the most important things ever for them. So yeah, kind of a downgrade there. David says the logo wasn’t bad, but the packaging was so off. Absolutely.
Okay, I should call it for the week. I’ve got to go do some real work before Aaron in the chat starts yelling at me to chop-chop and get things done. Thanks, everybody. That was You’re Not the Audience for the week. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to tackle next week, but I’ll post it on all the socials, probably on Monday. Thanks, Aaron. “Get back to work, slacker.” I’m working over here. Thanks for coming. This was a great one.