Design Lessons from Abrdn: Why ‘Cllng Yr Brnd Smthng Lk Ths’ Was a Bad Idea

The best design choices don’t require a second thought.

A well-designed brand name should be instantly recognizable, easy to remember, and easy to say. Abrdn failed all three.

Dropping vowels isn’t inherently a bad move. Plenty of brands have done it successfully—think Tumblr or Flickr. But those names were still easy to pronounce. ‘Abrdn’ wasn’t. It looked like someone fat-fingered a keyboard and hit send before proofreading.

If a name forces people to stop and decode it, you’ve lost them. Brand recognition shouldn’t feel like a puzzle.

Stripping things down is a core principle of modern design, but there’s a difference between clean and confusing. Good minimalism makes things clearer. Bad minimalism removes what makes something work in the first place.

Abrdn’s attempt at modernity was functionally broken. It looked sleek on a slide deck but didn’t hold up in real-world use. If a name gets confused for a software error or a CAPTCHA code, it’s a failure.

Branding Is About Trust, Not Trends

Corporate rebrands are often driven by the desire to look ‘fresh’ and ‘digital-first,’ but that doesn’t mean gutting a name’s history for the sake of aesthetics. Aberdeen had brand equity. It was an established financial name with credibility. Abrdn threw that away in exchange for... what? A fleeting sense of tech startup energy?

The irony? They’re now returning to ‘aberdeen group’—lowercase, of course, because some design sins refuse to die.

Good branding gets talked about. Bad branding gets memed. The ‘Abrdn’ mockery wasn’t just a few Twitter jabs—it was relentless. Countdown memes, Financial Times jokes, entire articles dunking on it. Even when the company claimed it was “corporate bullying,” the internet just doubled down.

A rebrand should strengthen a company’s reputation. Instead, Abrdn’s became a punchline. If your audience spends more time joking about your name than engaging with your services, you’ve made a mistake.

Changing your brand identity should be a long-term play, not something you reverse in a few years because the backlash never faded. The cost of a name change isn’t just about signage or website updates—it’s about public perception.

Now, with ‘aberdeen group,’ they’ve hit undo. But the damage is done. People will always remember Abrdn as that company that tried to make vowels optional.

The Abrdn saga is a reminder that branding isn’t about trying to be trendy—it’s about being effective. A good brand name should be effortless to read, recall, and respect. If it looks like an autocorrect failure, you’re setting yourself up for a rebrand of the rebrand.

Or, as the Financial Times put it: Lv Abrdn aln.