Fonts Have Trend Cycles Too: An Analysis of the Decline of Sans-Serif

April 23, 2026

By: Victoria Yu

Courtesy of Evan Brown via Design Mantic

Any typophile will have heard of the disastrous Jaguar rebrand of 2025.

I distinctly remember my brother covering his mouth and laughing as he showed me the new Jaguar logo, a mix of uppercase and lowercase arcs forming the name “JaGUar” (but smoother, like how 7-11 does it). Their website was unrecognizable, opening with the line: “The new era: We're here to delete ordinary. To go bold. To copy nothing.” Yet this rebrand felt like a copy of every direct-to-consumer startup from the last five years. To understand why this shift triggered such a strong reaction, we need to examine how fonts influence brand perception.

A Tale of Two Fonts: Serif vs. Sans Serif

Serif fonts are defined by small lines or strokes at the end of letters (serifs). They emerged in ancient Greek and Latin stone inscriptions, then carried into the print world with the invention of the printing press, continuing to be used in digital typefaces and physical advertisements to this day. These fonts include familiar names like Times New Roman or Garamond, and other more obscure names such as Spectral or Georgia (two of my personal favorites). 

Courtesy of Natalia Y. via Unsplash

Sans-serif fonts, by contrast, remove these stroke details: fonts without (or sans) serifs. Although they also have historical roots, their widespread adoption accelerated around the mid-1800s, when the readability of serif fonts became an issue faced by advertisers and newspapers as print media was popularized. Today, sans-serif fonts appear everywhere, including as the default font of Google Docs (Arial) or the font that your English teacher probably overused (Calibri). And yes, this category does include the infamous Comic Sans, but let’s not mention it. 

As I mentioned earlier, part of the rise in popularity of sans-serif fonts was to increase readability in various font sizes, whether that be for a storefront window or an advertisement in the newspaper. Beyond the technical differences between serif and sans-serif fonts, these categories have accumulated cultural meaning over time. Consumers began to associate the font choices of a company with the company itself. When you think of classic luxury brands, the first brand that comes to mind would probably be the likes of Tiffany and Co. or Dior, something instantly recognizable as timelessly splendid, written with a serif font (look it up right now!). Compare this to new and modern companies like Microsoft or Amazon that highlight the technical capabilities and accomplishments of the 21st century. Their sans-serif logos lead consumers to associate sans-serif fonts with simplicity and modernity, something sleek and current.

Courtesy of the Business of Fashion

But this move toward legibility came at the cost of the soul. By adopting near-identical, geometric sans-serif systems, these brands traded their unique typographic voice for a homogenized tone. When every brand uses the same font, it stops being a signature and starts being uniform. The choice to shorten names and flatten fonts became the default, making the brand landscape increasingly indistinguishable.

Fonts Done Right?

Some companies, however, seem unfazed by the modernity rush. Honda, for example, hasn’t had a drastic branding transformation for a long time. Even their recent logo adjustment was incremental; it’s still an “H”, just a bit boxier and wider, which continues to convey the legacy of reliability they've built. To illustrate, the family minivan, the Honda Odyssey, has been with my family since before I was born, turning 18 years old this year. Yet it is still fully functional, giving it the nickname “old reliable” in our family. When we moved halfway across the country, it was the car that carried all of our belongings. Even though Honda has changed how it markets itself, moving from purely functional advertising to more emotionally driven storytelling, they have kept their soul and core brand image intact.

Jaguar’s case is more complex. Although its logo was already sans-serif prior to this shift, the redesign altered key properties of the brand. To start, the previous logo is more stretched and high-contrast, meaning that there are noticeable differences in thickness across parts of letters. This stylistic choice subtly references speed and performance, characteristics that make a luxury car feel truly luxurious. By comparison, the new logo has rounder letters, emphasizing smooth and consistent curves without contrast (the thickness in each letter is the same all the way through). The issue isn't just the font category, but the “sans-ing” of the brand's heritage. In typography, “sans” means “without”, and Jaguar's rebrand left them “without” a soul. By removing the high-contrast strokes that signaled luxury and the iconic jaguar, the company deleted both its font and its history.

Courtesy of Grahame Jenkins via Unsplash

In comparison, another luxury car brand that has handled its brand perception and strategy with perfection is Ferrari. Upon entry to the Ferrari website, customers are met with a fade to black display of its signature horse logo. This continues to happen every time you switch pages. Although this can get annoying, the intention of this repetition is clear: their defining mark is the horse. This is Marketing 101, making sure you know it’s Ferrari when you see that horse. Ferrari understands that their visual icons (their logo and its specific typography) are irreplaceable assets. Jaguar, meanwhile, erased the very symbols that consumers used to recognize and differentiate their brand, leaving behind a vacuum of generic fonts.

Somehow, AI Has Entered This Conversation Too

This push for sleek, sans-serif modernity, however, has hit a major wall. The catalyst? Artificial Intelligence. The broader context is critical.

The rise of AI is already a horse beaten to death with discourse and controversy, and the AI-saturated marketing strategies of most companies continue to reflect its popularity. When was the last time you’ve been on a website that hasn’t emphasized its AI features or “handy new chatbot” that’s “ready to help”? Even as I opened Handshake to track my internship search, the new hyperlink for their website read “the career network for the AI economy”. And the one thing that all these AI sites have in common? Sans-serif.

Courtesy of Solen Feyissa via Unsplash

This is the root of the problem: Sans-serif has become the official typeface of the algorithm. It is the font of “optimized function” and “frictionless data”. But when every website is sleek and new, nothing feels human, and differentiation disappears. This growing distaste for “clean” styles is proof that the trend cycle of minimalism is waning. Trend cycles go through five phases, the most notable being the “early adopters”, the first to use a future trendy product, and the “laggards”, the last to hop on the trend. Most brands fall somewhere in between, in the “early and late majority” when it comes to jumping on a bandwagon. Mapping this cycle onto the timeline of serif to sans-serif transition, the early adopters began this transformation around 2017 during a “sans-serif invasion”, while laggards like Jaguar are only now beginning to take part in this trend. The market, however, has already become oversaturated with every “sans-serif” company before them, making their rebrand feel stale rather than innovative. The intentionality of aesthetic preference is lost.

Serif’s Great Comeback and the Return of the Legacy Brand

At the same time, broader economic and cultural shifts are reshaping consumer preferences. As AI and automated manufacturing have lowered the cost of production, the market has become flooded with low-quality, high-volume goods (think Temu or Shein). In response, consumers are beginning to search for the opposite: a return to artisanal goods, craftsmanship, and signs of human touch. The “Serif Resurgence”, with its historical and material associations, is one such signal.

Courtesy of Jon Tyson via Unsplash

An example of this counter-movement occurred recently at a talk with the CEO of Oscar de La Renta, Alex Bolen. An audience member asked whether or not the fashion house would adopt AI on their website during the production cycle. Without hesitation, he replied with a stern “no”. The fashion house relies more on in-person clients, so their website caters to ready-to-wear customers, or those who want a preview of de La Renta garments. Therefore, they value not the efficiency that AI promises to deliver, but rather the human-centered, client-brand relationship.

Jaguar’s rebrand failed because they tried to "delete ordinary" by conforming to the most ordinary design trend of the last decade. They attempted to signal modernity at the exact moment the industry began to tire of it. While tech companies will continue to exist in the world of sans-serif simplicity, the next era of luxury belongs to those who embrace the "imperfection" of the human stroke. For a car company with a history as rich as Jaguar’s, the path forward should not have been a deletion of their past reputation, but rather a bolder, serif-based celebration of it.