In the grand history of horrible logo remakes, Cracker Barrel is nowhere near as Legendary as what Doug Burgum did to the state of North Dakota.

Fonts matter.

Logos are tough to design.

In one basic image, you’re supposed to encapsulate an entire brand and make it memorable enough that people will come to recognize it and associate positive feelings when they see just the logo.

Some logos look great until they are launched to the public, at which point the realization strikes that the logo is surprisingly offensive and pervy. I visit this page of such logos (and their redesigns) often just to laugh, frankly.

Good rule of thumb: always show your pre-launch logo to high school boys and see if they snicker.

Not all logo redesigns are based on the need to protect the public from offense, mind you. Some are simply updates that improve the logo and make it more modern and easier to use on products and ads that may not have been around when the logo was first created. Some of those redesigns make things worse.

For example, Cracker Barrel.

I guess.

Look, I’ll be honest: I didn’t hate the new logo redo that made the news. It was boring, to be sure, and reminded me of the Denny’s logo, which made me hungry for Moons Over My Hammy. But, while it wasn’t horrible, the new logo was nothing special and lacked the story the old one had. It might have made mild sense at the time, seemingly cleaning up a fussy old design that didn’t fit modern sensibilities, but as time moved on from the redesign, the original logo (of which knowledge of it is the only reason the new version made any sense) would be forgotten. And then we’d just have another boring logo with zero meaning.

Logos aren’t just design. They are stories.

Take the state of North Dakota, for example, nearly always the last state anyone visits and the punchline of many jokes.

We just got a new logo this year, which is actually pretty nice. And although it will only be used in addition to the state’s official logo—a stinker that the previous Governor, Doug Burgum, had foisted upon the state—perhaps its use will grow.

I sincerely hope so.

Why?

Because the logo Burgum decreed into being back in 2018 with virtually no input—replacing a beloved “Legendary” logo made with a custom energetic font befitting of The Roughrider State that had perfectly served the state for 15 years with the most bland thing you could imagine—caused such an uproar, designers around the state spoke out and tried to get King Burgum to change it back.¹

It was bad enough our tourism department had quit making the wonderful old commercials that featured ghostly historical figures and swapped in Josh Duhamel who, though probably a nice guy, isn’t really all that interesting and is basically a B-list Hollywood star. We essentially said, for relevance’s sake, that we had to drop Custer and Teddy Roosevelt for the guy who was in one of those robot movies.

Burgum’s new official state logo landed like a turd the moment it was launched. The conversation on Facebook hovered between angry and hilarious, because we really loved our old logo.

Someone even created a statement and had a petition to revert the logo back to what it had been, while others mocked the thoughtless nature of the logo by making other versions:

Were we out of line in doing so? You decide (and also consider the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation logo when doing so):

Screenshot from old blog post contrasting the two logos for reader clarity.

In an October 5, 2018, blog post entitled “The impossibility of being legendary with sans serif fonts,” I also voiced my opinion.

“A legend is a truly special, unique, and standout thing. As a state, the brand of Legendary was a great fit, particularly for those who remember the commercials from years ago. They had beautiful music and camera work, images of the landscape of the state with historical figures superimposed across them, fading, showing the legendary aspects of Native Americans, Teddy Roosevelt, Custer, Bonanza farming, settlers—the whole lot.”

I drove home the point that a logo saying the state was “legendary” is very different from a logo that said “be legendary.” The former is declarative—this is what this place is—while the latter indicates performative, a hoped-for existence we have to keep trying for, a place to consume experiences instead of being changed by it. We changed our focus from the place to the individual, the curse of modern times.

“You cannot sell the state of being legendary. It does not come from large groups of people doing and seeing the same stuff.

But it makes sense in this age.

Today, we don't go places to learn from them. We go places to experience them, to sort of consume them and use them up. So, North Dakota is not selling a place of history, a place that can change you because of its legendary nature, but a place where you can go do some stuff and become legendary yourself. In a generation that collects experiences and is so me-centered, apparently, you aren't interested in legendary places but being a legend yourself.”

It wasn’t just the change from “legendary” to “be legendary,” but the font and appearance of the logo itself.

“What is this new, refreshed logo but Futura font, or something similar? Does it at all look like it has any kind of spirit, much less a renewed one? Does it suggest unlimited promise and potential, or any visual sense of expandability?

Not only do I maintain that you can't be legendary, particularly in your own lifetime, but I don't think you'll get there with standard out-of-the-box sans-serif fonts.

The old one, while not following the incredibly boring design sensibilities of the mindful minimal Steve-Jobs-enslaved age of sans-serif flatness, is energetic, exciting, and rough. Like the state. The new one looks like a pleasant local insurance company asked their administrative assistant to make some letterheads in Microsoft Publisher. The old one has angles and curves, a personality that pushes and pulls, not hemming in your eye on the left or the right, mimicking the open North Dakota landscape. The new one probably needs a bed pan, it's so sanitary. It is visually dead, with no movement left or right, no sense of an expanding horizon. The old one looks like you might possibly attain legendary status someday, while the new one looks like you might fill out forms in triplicate.”

Hey. Fonts matter. The lettering matters. It’s part of the message.

The blowback forced the state tourism folks to respond:

"Be Legendary conveys a renewed spirit and the unlimited promise and potential of our state. It allows us to expand our message to reach new audiences, from the people who live here to those who visit."

That’s all well and good, though extensively full of bullshit, but the truth is that if “Be Legendary” was our state slogan, why did we choose to express it in what appeared to be 100% Blandium? Lo, these many years (since 2018), this state has been existing in the boring realm of office letterhead logos, struggling to shed our office togs and burst into legendary status.

On the other hand, there was the license plate redesign that had occurred a few years before we went sans serif as a state. I had to exchange my beautiful Lewis and Clark license plate for what can only be described as a god-awful collage of every North Dakota trope. Sunset. Bison. Butte. Hideous Old Western Font that made the state’s name unreadable (they did change that due to outcry to…a sans serif font). I also wrote about this at the time:

“I’ve seen blog posts and social comments on the general loathing felt for the new license plates, as well as for the hefty price tag the state paid for someone to design the thing, and I feel warm inside knowing that the government continues to limp along inefficiently as it has in the past. At least it (the license plate, though maybe the government is more deserving) will be mostly covered with dust and mud, thanks to township roads.

The previous Centennial license plate was well done. Easy to read, fairly simple graphics. But now I am stuck with this new license plate in which so much space was dedicated to a scenic panorama that the license number was moved higher, nearly up to an altitude affecting airplane traffic. I suppose I should give thanks for the pretty sunset, but I’d rather forgo it to better see if the car in front of me has a BOLO out on it.

It’s sort of like designing an elevator that doesn’t quite go all the way to the top, but plays pretty music as far as it will go.”

So Cracker Barrel.

It’s good to keep the old guy there leaning on the barrel, making the restaurant a good place for crackers to go. And ever since Jonathan Merritt, speaker and author for publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times, the openly gay son of the Rev. James Merritt, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, posted on Twitter many years ago a kind of mocking of the sort of people who eat at Cracker Barrel by thumbing his nose at the kind of people who enjoy its “treacly gift shop”—where I’ve gotten many Christmas gifts in the past, thanks very much, Jonathan—I’ve had a soft spot for Ye Olde Barrel despite their rather tight grasp on DEI and progressive causes. Which Jonathan should love, I’d assume.

Glad to see you stick around, barrel-leaning Uncle Herschel. Nothing does a brand logo worse than moderns who doesn’t want to improve a brand, but mostly wants to negate something about the brand.

Stay true, and never go sans-serif, my friend.

1. There was also concern about how the selection of the designer and the payment had gone. According to local news reports, “KNOX News Radio reported the logo was designed for less than $10,000 (meaning the job wasn't required to go out for bid) by Muskoda Communications of Hawley, Minn. Muskoda is owned by Kara Ellefson, who (according to her LinkedIn profile) is a former employee at both Great Plains Software and Microsoft, the companies that built Burgum's fortune. So it appears an out-of-state former colleague of the governor got the job, for a small fee, and the result is uninspiring.”

Two years later, Burgum had his campaign postcards printed in Minnesota, despite many printers available locally and within the state. He couldn’t get enough of paying non-North Dakotans to do work for the state, even though he held Main Street Initiative conferences as if he cared about North Dakota businesses.

There’s a reason we called him King Burgum.