“He just put it in bold!” exclaimed Ryan Gosling’s character in a Saturday Night Live video that attracted a cult following in the world of graphic design last year. The follow-up to a 2017 SNL bit in which Gosling played a man haunted by his realization that the logo for the 2009 blockbuster Avatar was expressed in the gauche Papyrus typeface, the newer video centered on his fresh horror of discovering that the same graphic designer responsible for the first logo had updated the wordmark for the movie’s sequel by simply setting it in bold type.

A year later, it seems that life is imitating satire, as, following last week’s announcement of Amazon’s brand refresh, 2025’s three biggest rebrands to date—including those of Walmart in January and OpenAI in February—have, to the untrained eye, more or less involved hitting “Ctrl B” on the companies’ wordmarks and logos to put them in bold.

All three of these corporate behemoths’ updated wordmarks are somewhat heavier than their predecessors, while not representing radical changes. Unlike Walmart’s brutalist look of a generation ago, with its massive and........

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