Bland Designs: Aldi

Aldi, the German supermarket giant, has recently announced they’re changing their logo. And I hate it.

I shop at Aldi for three crucial reasons: it’s cheap; their ‘special buys’ bring an element of mystery and fun into my otherwise mundane life; and I love minimalism.

That’s what they’re the best at – minimalism. Coles and Woolies, such bastions of Australian domesticity, don’t capture the consumerist zeitgeist like Aldi does. No plastic bags, no recognisable brands, not even proper shelves. It’s brutalist, it’s chic, it’s Bauhaus, it’s so very European.

I sometimes imagine I’m a struggling interior designer from Düsseldorf when I shop at Aldi. I fill my canvas bag with bratwurst and spätzle, and pretend my Mazda is a late-90’s BMW. I blast Kraftwerk the whole drive home, where I sit on the floor and cry over a poster of Angela Merkel.

Aldi, in their attempt to water down their Teutonic style to make it more palatable to anglo-Australian audiences, have sapped the life out of their shopping experience. To misquote Freud (who was actually Austrian), “sometimes a logo is just a logo”.

But nein! A logo is meant to embody a brand, meant to instil familiarity and trust within the consumer. And Aldi have broken my trust. Gone are the angular lines and block colours, and in with the WordArt-esque sheen, the smooth edges, devoid of soul. How very postmodern.

Ironically, the new Aldi logo looks just like the kind of fake-brand logo that Aldi puts on its home-branded products.