If you thought Olive Garden's logo couldn't get any worse, you were wrong.
On Monday, the Darden-owned restaurant chain unveiled a brand refresh. The perplexing cluster of grapes that graced Olive Garden's logo for a decade and a half has devolved into a twiggy branch that appears to be an unfortunate shade of chartreuse. The previous tacky pseudo-script laying out the chain's name has become a font that's even more half-baked.
The early feedback is not good. One Twitter commenter aptly describes the overall design as looking "like it was drawn with a breadstick." Another interprets the new logo, created with help from design shop Lippincott, as a sign that the restaurant will "now be a home decor company specializing in mid-priced hand towels."
John Brownlee at Fast Company offers a detailed takedown of the color scheme in a side by side comparison with the old logo.
Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and logo redesigns can be notoriously touchy business. But this could easily be on par with the notorious Gap crowdsourcing and Target drop-shadow debacles—or it would if people cared as much about Olive Garden as they do about Gap or Target.
