Dairy Queen is one of my favorite fast food places. The one close to us has consistently good food, fast, and hot. And their ice cream cakes, “Blizzards,” and “Moo-lattes” (something which I’m still trying to perfect at home) are marvelous. DQ also has one of the most recognizable logos in all of the fast food industry. So, when something works, what do we do? Change it into something awful, apparently.

Behold, the Dairy Queen logo, before and after:

image from underconsideration.com

This is horrible design. I’m glad they didn’t chuck the whole thing; at least it’s still recognizable. Over at underconsideration.com the comments are in agreement: the new design sucks. I think that, if I had a recognizable logo that went with a (relatively) respected brand, the very last thing I do would be to change the logo. Particularly, to add meaningless shapes to the logo, in other, clashing, colors, without any sort of inference as to what they might represent. DQ had a logo that was clean, simple, effective, and easily reproducible in silhouette and two color. Now they have a logo that is none of those things.

One of the commenters at the link above suggests that maybe the orange-y swoosh is for hot, the blue-y for cold, as in “hot eats, cool treats,” one of their taglines. That makes a bit more sense to me, but are they going to go around to all of America and tell us this? Maybe a new ad campaign will try to reinforce this, if that truly is the meaning of the extraneous things on the new logo. Still, this simply cannot be worth the effort, or the money for rebranding. Foolish.