old logo

new logo

left: the sign outside our hotel; right: the new logo

Over Christmas I stayed in a Red Roof Inn along the highway in North Carolina. While our hotel sported the classic lower-case logo of blackletter typography in the textura style, just up the highway was another Red Roof Inn with a completely different sign. Apparently I don't get out of New York City enough. About seven years ago RRI unveiled a new logo designed by the Laurel Group, a San Francisco branding and marketing company. The new logo is being applied to renovated hotels.
As you might guess from my fondness for PDBs (Public Displays of Blackletter), I'll miss the old blackletter logo. The letterforms have that nice "picket fence" vertical stress of textura and echo the angles of the red boxes that often contain them (they don't seem intended to suggest anything teutonic about the design of the hotel chain, which was founded in Ohio in 1973).
The new logo is safely bland and inoffensive, unless you are offended by blandness. More tedious is the inevitable marketing justification for the new logo. Accor North America, the holding company of RRI, announced:

"Retiring the familiar Old English typestyle inside a red box with slanted top, the new logo breaks 'out of the box' to reflect the contemporary, spacious feeling of Red Roof Inn's new room design while conveying more energy and personal attention through its handwritten typestyle." Also: "The new handwritten type style conveys the updated, casual, relaxed atmosphere and friendly personalized service."

The new lettering is the branding equivalent of sweatpants, which I suppose is "updated" and personal. It says that you don't need to comb your hair or tuck in your shirt when you fumble into the hotel lobby for that free cup of coffee in the morning. It certainly does NOT convey energy! The stacked architectural tension of the old logo had more energy and - quite simply - more personality, even if it was naive and ahistorical.