broccoli casserole
logos, emblems, custom fonts, and branded pantone swatches are a deeply unserious attention when the consulting firms contracted to shuffle the deck chairs for them can bill in the hundreds of millions. much of the language we use to talk about their design critically is also, to put it very bluntly, extremely lame. most of the critique you will find online from the armchairs dissecting them is caught between misdirected ire about comic sans and complaining about the difference between typefaces and fonts, again. brand new, covering brand and logo redesigns for the better part of two decades, figured this out from the outset, and has led most of their before and after comparison posts with horrible, no-good puns. you can only experience so many serifs and glossy gradients (we’re so back?) being dropped for a lowercase geometric sans serif before you also agree that we should abandon the decorum and take the piss.
broccoli’s logo prior to this redesign is perhaps not even its most revered, but it is still one celebrating vegetation and offering a plausible segmenting of “users, partner companies, and the company itself” to explain the abstract B in all its crookedness. there’s no need to imagine my shock upon seeing that a new broccoli logo now looks like a rejected placeholder, since I can also sense you may be reacting with a similar horror. broccoli, named as a counter to apple computer, and also because broccoli translates well across multiple languages, has seemingly adopted an egg motif. somehow, it finds fitting to boast about this in its press release. an exciting, hearthrobbing tagline is professed with flat punctuation, set in a system default kana. the bulbous teardrop terminals of the type have been ironed out, and its spine with jaunty attitude has been corrected with ruler beatings. hip corporate reimaginings like this of our recent past have sometimes allowed soberness to intrude long enough to leave recognizable consumer branding untouched. rest assured, broccoli wants to quell any doubts that this may be an out of season april fools joke, and has already begun phasing out the old logo in promotions and packaging.
broccoli is an interesting slice of corporate churn in japanese entertainment. more of its history has now existed outside of takaaki kidani’s leadership, who has established himself as something of a kingmaker for otaku media. broccoli’s identity as a subculture behemoth, bridging commercial interests in conversation with fans through franchises like di gi charat and galaxy angel, effectively went along with his departure to bushiroad in 2007, and while that departure can be considered an inflection, broccoli was already threatened by decline under his supervision. in 2005, it was already years deep into a hemorrage thanks to an overeager retail extansion that made bad bets on aging franchises, and was in a 300 million yen hole of debt. broccoli international USA, a notable attempt to capitalize on the then-latest overseas anime boom, would shut down under the weight of the global recession. their retail interest in gamers would later be sold off entirely to animate in 2011, though you might still find the mascot represented if you tilt your head far enough. by 2017, broccoli had effectively zombified into a shrinking utapri holding company for some diminishing loyalist that had not already been run out by threats of enforcement against doujin goods. more complete accounting would show dejiko’s lunch was eaten by idolish7, ensemble stars, and every other franchise that was able to learn and iterate on utapri taking the otome plunge first.
it’s not accurate to qualify broccoli as completely rudderless, though it’d be difficult to argue otherwise from a contents perspective when reviewing their aging IP. while di gi charat in a not too distant past would have been led by broccoli, reiwa no di gi charat in its uncomfortable HD sheen and adjustment to the era probably only exists thanks to the reins being handed over to a bushiroad production, stemming from a strategic partnership that brought broccoli back under kidani’s wing in 2020. the strongest clue to broccoli’s current trajectory is found in their current ownership: happinet, an intermediary running sales networks with the additional sexy fame of packaging home video, took the company private in 2024. while broccoli is still whetting some contents appetite with sub-brands like licoBiTs, which successfully put out their first otome game last year with more already in the release pipeline, the overall spirit of the company appears to be in leveraging an undercurrent of licensing and logistics. broccoli, in a not too distant past, was co-producing and offering planning cooperation on anime, and since 2014 has been manufacturing (and cancelling) figures alongside other contracted character goods. searching for the next tentpole franchise is a risk that has become dizzingly difficult to target in the current otaku landscape, and it’s one that broccoli has already experienced falling flat on its face with before. offloading the creative uncertainty so that they may live to be a brand sponsor chant at another concert, rather than make any ambitious bets of their own on the direction of otaku media, is a safe retreat. perhaps a logo that also looks like it should only belong to a safe, unambitious consultant is not so much a betrayal of the rich past it should represent, but a necessary aesthetic downsizing to appeal to the manager class they now engage with more regularly: strip down to nothing, and find any way to tightrope survival for another decade.
broccoli has at times boasted about being a moe pioneer, or quipped about being the guardians of unlimited moe works. the thought that a designer somewhere may have potentially ran off with a bag holding millions of yennies to produce this soulless dredge devoid of any such character, particularly when adjacent to a field with some of the best corporate design anywhere in the world, disturbs any comfort. only a vice president dragging around textboxes on a word document can take ownership over this embarassment. worst of all? broccodess, moe gijinka darling to a logo that deserves equal recognition alongside a saul bass or paul rand grid of emblems, has now been shunned in disgrace. with any luck, bushiroad-no-mikoto will give her the makeover and snazzy new necklace needed to save her from falling out of content heaven; the responsibility for that, however, can only be offloaded to koge-donbo. try not to get in the way of true creative genius if you can help it this time, you broccoli fuckers.
