There is something odd about the way we treat new logos. A company unveils a considered piece of work, months of effort go into it, and within hours the internet decides it is the worst thing ever made. The Cracker Barrel rebrand was a perfect example.
Two quick points before I begin. I liked the new Cracker Barrel logo. It was not flawless, and with hindsight I could easily map out a handful of decisions or executions that might have landed better. Plenty of design commentators have already done that work in forensic detail. Even so, it felt like a reasonable evolution of what was, in truth, a very dated and awkward original. The second point is that this entire topic has been picked over relentlessly. I am unlikely to add anything groundbreaking, but the Cracker Barrel saga is still a clear example of some troubling behaviour within the design community and far beyond it.
Having worked on large scale rebrands myself, I know how much stress, graft and negotiation happens out of sight. You are balancing strategic goals with the quirks and concerns of stakeholders who often struggle to grasp the subtleties of identity design. These projects can become nightmarish long before the public ever sees them. The tougher part can sometimes come after launch, when the commentary rolls in from people who were never involved in the process. Some of that criticism can be fair, but in my experience much of it is ill judged, poorly informed or based on surface impressions.
This is broadly the type of reaction I saw with Cracker Barrel. Over the last decade, almost every major brand has needed to design for multiple devices, screens and resolutions. Scalability is now fundamental to identity design and it explains why so many global brands have shifted towards simpler, flatter marks. The original Cracker Barrel logo was cluttered in general, but the real problem came when it needed to shrink. It simply was not built for the digital world.
My wider point is about the sheer volume of hostility that greets almost any new logo or identity. We have seen the same pattern with the new Gov.uk design and, more recently, the Utah 2034 logo. A wave of opinion forms, usually from people with limited understanding of the design process, and it becomes the dominant narrative. Companies then panic. They fold under pressure. And the irony is that history shows how unnecessary that panic can be. AirBnB, Uber and Starbucks all faced loud pushback when they changed direction. They held their nerve, and now their identities feel entirely natural to most people.
Cracker Barrel is a more complicated case. The criticism went far beyond the usual design chatter. It reached the point where the US President weighed in and the company started taking real hits to revenue. Some of that could have been anticipated and possibly softened. Keeping the Cracker Barrel character as a secondary graphic might have eased the cultural shock, and a clearer messaging strategy might have taken customers along for the ride instead of confronting them with a sudden, wholesale shift.
What troubles me most is the final decision to abandon the updated identity altogether. Significant time, energy and budget were invested by both the internal team and the agency, only for it to be scrapped and replaced with the weaker original. That feels like a victory for the loudest voices rather than the most informed ones. Unless, of course, the backlash was the real objective. A cynical reading might suggest that the furore generated more attention than the rebrand ever would have achieved on its own, even if it came at the expense of good design and the professionalism of the entire industry.priately.
