Logo maximalism is back, and cinema called it first

For the last decade, branding chased minimalism, stripping logos down to survive on tiny screens and travel across every market at once. The result: brands that look sleek but interchangeable, having quietly traded their personality for legibility. Now the pendulum is swinging back, and the clearest evidence of where it's swinging to isn't in branding at all. It's in film titles, which never stopped treating type as a storytelling tool.

• The flattening backfired. Chasing "sleek and modern" across shrinking screens and global markets meant brands stripped out mascots, wordmarks and detail, and ended up looking like each other. Sprite, Saint Laurent and countless others lost what made them recognisable at a glance.

• The correction is already visible. Burberry (under Daniel Lee) reinstated its knight emblem and high-contrast serif logotype. Pepsi and Burger King have pulled back toward their 70s/80s look. Aston Martin and Porsche never fully left; they've simply refined heritage marks rather than flattening them.

• It's part of a bigger cultural shift. People are pushing back against frictionless, disposable digital experiences and gravitating toward things that feel tangible, crafted and connected to something real: the same instinct driving demand for physical media, analogue tools, and "made by a person" signals.

• Cinema never made the mistake branding did. While corporate design spent a decade flattening itself, film title design kept getting more detailed and specific, because a title sequence has one job: prime the audience emotionally before a single frame of story plays.

• A title does roughly 50% of the emotional lifting, and audiences never consciously register how. Designer Teddy Blanks is the clearest current example: for Werwulf, he researched 14th-century calligraphy to construct historically accurate lettering; for Barbie, he bought original 1970s dolls on eBay just to hand-trace the imperfections in the original packaging type, rather than using a clean digital recreation.

• That level of research is the point, not a side detail. It signals human craft and intention in a landscape now saturated with generic, AI-smoothed output, and it's exactly the kind of "aura" minimalist logos can't produce.

• The takeaway for Paradise: before writing a single word of copy, ask what a typographic choice communicates subliminally on its own. And when presenting creative to clients, sell the research behind the type choice, not just the type itself. That's what turns a font decision into a strategy they can't easily argue with.