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What is the simplest design that can still convey emotion, warmth, human-ness?

Minimal design has dominated the scene in recent years (maybe decades), and in some ways feel like an encapsulation of where we are as a society, a constant churn of soulless branding exercises that end up costing millions yet end up with the same generic conclusion. In some way, this feels like an inevitable end game for design under capitalism, branding under fascism, an aesthetic of hate and resentment towards its very users. Sometimes we hear stories about the millions spent to rebrand and transform a company from some storied logo to yet another Futura font modernization, and we ask, are we missing something? Is there some secret genius to this work, something that the designers, the companies know that we don't?

There is no secret, at least no secret if we are aware of what's going on. Branding can use all the flowery language it wants, but at the end of the day the work of branding, and the work of design under capitalism, is to be the language to sell extraction, exploitation, and waste. When it sinks tons of resources and hundreds of hours from talented and skilled designers, artists and creatives, it's not a case of mismanagement, it is capitalist design working as intended, a pit where creativity gets redirected into its least imaginative form.

There's this constant discourse about how all these new logos and designs are uninspired and boring, and while that critique is true, the fault is less on individual designers being uncreative, but rather an environment that is only built for the uninspired and boring to thrive. Of course, in spite of that, there are occasional breakthroughs, novel ideas and meaningful designs that buck the trend, but they are anomalies of the system, examples of beauty that shine through in spite of how the system functions, rather than proof of the system working.

So I made a few simple diagrams and designs, thinking of what is the most minimal design that can still convey something human, something real before it gets washed away by corporate design conventions and branding documents. I don't think these examples are necessarily "successful", but rather exercises in finding where that line might be, if there is one. Design still feels so meaningful to me, as a poetic visual language, as a useful propaganda communication tool, but its also an art medium that is so heavily mediated by modern capitalism and industrialization. Sometimes it takes some designing to decipher what about the work is still human, still has a soul, still worth creating in this world.