POV: Are social media pile-ons stifling the creative industry?

Launching a high-profile rebrand today is a scary process. Just ask Jaguar. The carmaker became headline news worldwide last year when it announced an all-new visual identity that was as contentious as it was (trying to be) contemporary. But while wider culture enjoys laughing at such perceived missteps, it seems there is a pure and special hatred that certain professional designers hold for rebrands they dislike.

GF Smith is a case in point. The British paper company launched a rebrand in January this year and was met with a heated debate that seemed to split the creative community in two. Partly this is down to how well-loved the company is – after all, many creatives go through their careers accompanied by GF Smith papers; the business and its products are dear to them. Partly it’s down to how well-loved the previous, more minimalist visual identity, created in 2014 by Made Thought, was in certain quarters of the design industry.

It was perhaps unsurprising, then, that the latest branding, which was developed by the design agency Templo alongside the in-house GF Smith team, elicited some strong reactions.

Most of the criticism fell into the category of healthy and open discussion, but there was a portion of the commentary that tipped into something more “toxic”, says Benjamin Watkinson, GF Smith’s creative director. “I welcome opinion and commentary,” he says. “It’s absolutely healthy for people to have a voice and to say if something isn’t for them. That’s what is so amazing about the creative industries.”

But when does healthy critique become something more toxic? Some of the people voicing their anger on social media took things a step (or three) too far, says Benjamin. “It starts getting toxic when people start saying ‘sack the design agency’ or ‘sack the brand director’ or ‘the person in charge needs to be fired.’ It wasn’t constructive, it wasn’t even really opinionated, it was just incredibly personal and had no creative point to it at all.” This was, Benjamin is quick to point out, a small minority – but it was nonetheless a visible and audible one.

Anoushka Rodda and Pali Palavathanan, the co-founders of Templo, felt that a portion of the criticism they received also had a “weird undertone around race and class,” says Pali, who believes that certain problematic ideas around Britishness, heritage and luxury were at play. These were all ideas that the rebrand was designed to shift away from. In some of the comments, they felt there was an implicit, objective “gold standard” that they were being judged against. But, Anoushka asks: “Who defines quality? Quality to a certain slice of the industry might mean minimalism and specific typefaces. Can’t we accept that the gold standard for an agency like Templo might look different to an agency that’s been around for 30 years?”

You could see this as just another chapter in the long story of how social media breeds polarisation. For starters, platforms like Instagram present the final execution and rarely provide the more in-depth context that might help explain an extreme set of choices. (Even when that context is shared, audiences seldom read to the end of a caption.) Some of the more vehement commentators can also hide behind a mask of anonymity on social media, and yet, the algorithm often seems to favour their more divisive comments.

Nonetheless, the impact could go far beyond just one agency or one client feeling the heat. Such social media pile-ons could have a far more wide-ranging damaging effect on the design industry, according to Anoushka and Benjamin. “A lot of creatives don’t appreciate how scary it is to be a client,” says Anoushka. “You brief the work, you commission the work, and then you put it out into the world. It’s a very vulnerable moment.”

Fearing a deluge of negativity, some brands might simply decide not to take any risks anymore. “The danger the creative industries face is that brand owners, marketing directors and managing directors, who are ultimately the people who are paying for work to be done by creative agencies, will simply not make big and bold decisions,” says Benjamin. “They won’t want the heat. And ultimately, who does that harm? It harms the creative industries.”

When it comes to social media feedback, it’s easier to focus on the negative, but it isn’t the whole story . When some of the more toxic comments started coming in, Benjamin was pleasantly surprised to find other designers coming out to bat for the new rebrand, unbidden by him or Templo. “Isn’t it great to see the creative industries starting to look at what other people are saying and actually self-policing?” he says. Perhaps we could all be a bit bolder when it comes to calling out this kind of toxicity when we see it.

Anoushka, meanwhile, preaches patience. While we might want to judge a rebrand on day one, they really only reveal their value over time (something the graphic design legend Paula Scher has spoken about often). Anoushka cites the Airbnb rebrand as an example. “That was met with a huge amount of backlash,” she recalls, “but now it’s five or ten years later and it’s just the logo, it’s the brand; we accept it, we don’t even think twice about it, we use it and move on.” Only time will tell if the same will be true of GF Smith’s new branding.

None of us want to work in an industry where every new project is met with universal, uncritical praise – that kind of back-slapping, saccharine positivity would also be bad for the design industry. But we need to find that line between constructive critique and vicious vitriol. Otherwise we might well be doing more harm than good. “I love that people aren’t afraid to express opinions, to have a debate and say, ‘I like this, I don’t like that.’ That’s why I love the creative industry so much,” says Benjamin. “But let’s take the toxicity out of it.”