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Thinking about a logo redesign?
If your brand is well recognized online, a logo redesign has its risks, but it can also bring about a needed change. Tastes change, companies change, and a new logo can be just what is needed to pull a new marketing campaign together. The key to staying successful is to listen to your audience and cater to them. Typography, colors, and symbols all work together to make an impact. If your logo is not quite sharing the right message, there is hope. Changes can be made.
Over the years, many famous brands have tweaked their logos. Often these brands get more simplistic with their logos over time.
Designing famous logos that will be recognized around the world is no easy feat. Today we will look at the logo redesigns for some famous brands for inspiration and tips.
Let’s start with the online retail giant Amazon. Amazon has been around since the 1990s, so you would expect some rebranding to happen over the years. This one is important to look at because the logo has gotten simpler and the changes more and more subtle over time. As one of the world’s most recognized brands, it is worth having a look.
On Marketplace.com, you can see Amazon’s earliest logos in the 90s, which used blues and stated that amazon.com is the “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” We know they now sell a lot more than books.
As time went on, Amazon moved to their now recognizable colors of black and yellow, tried out uppercase letters, and then back to their current lowercase version.
The logo had a yellow underline, and then design agency Turner Duckworth gave Amazon their classic smile or “smirk” that connects the a to z, showing that the marketplace is not just for books but everything your heart could desire. More recently, Amazon dropped the .com as they have moved beyond the internet to physical stores too.
This one is a newer kid on the block. Uber was developed in 2009 under the name UberCab. But as with many companies, Uber has since expanded not just to include rides like you would normally take in a Taxi Cab but food delivery, as well.
Business Insider Uber's design History
Uber also has stuck with very simplistic branding using black and white while adding green for Uber Eats, the color of nature and health.
The Uber branding design team from Wolff Olins said that Uber is changing how the world moves. They wanted to reflect that while making customers who use the services feel secure.
“Uber came to us at a time of immense change. With a new leadership team on the horizon, we helped shift the company from a rideshare company to a platform for global mobility; from a Silicon Valley perspective to a global outlook; from growth-focused to people-focused.” Wolff Olins
The team kept the rebrand simple to accommodate the hundreds of cities that Uber operates in around the world. They worked with easy to read typography to make the logo easy to recognize and read across languages.
The credit business is big business, and you want to go with a trusted and well-known brand. The logo redesign team at MasterCard kept the recognized colors and cleaned things up a bit, making the text easier to read.
This shows the change to a more digital experience as multiple famous brands have removed typography from their actual logos, as this can make things harder to read on our small smart devices. MasterCard has such a strong recognition just with their orange and red colored circles that they could get away with this. Sometimes color and symbols alone are enough to efficiently convey the brand.
They still often use the word MasterCard in white under their logo, but they now have the freedom to show the connected circles alone when needed. This works great on small credit cards.
It is a reminder to look at how your logo will be used and the different sizes your design needs to accommodate.
The social media platform for sharing photos started out with a cute vintage Polaroid-looking camera. It made you know the app was photography-related and elicited a bit of nostalgia. However, likely catering to newer generations, the company later rebranded with the bright pink, purple, and orange, almost tie-dye hues that we see today.
Spyre Studios the Evolution of the Instagram Logo
Instagram has expanded to include more than one mobile app, including Layout, Boomerang, and Hyperlapse. The redesign allowed them to use the same colors, creating different symbols to represent each of the apps and keep everything uniform.
The new icon took inspiration from the previous icon simplifying the camera and updating it to a brighter palette. You have to admit that it does stand out now in the App Store.
The Pizza Hut logo is an interesting example because it has changed over time, but the company reverted a bit, giving an ode to the classic roof logo from the 60s.
Playing on the word “hut,” the company added a roof to their logo as the pizza chain is a place for families to gather and eat. Around 2010, yellow and green were added for a glossier look. The company has kept the roof but converted it over to a monochromatic logo of red. Red has been the iconic color of Pizza Hut throughout the years, no matter the changes. It represents Italian food, after all. We love that pizza sauce.
It could be a good idea for companies that have been on the block a while to revisit an older version of their branding to bring back all those great memories to loyal long-time customers.
The past meeting the future.
"Pizza Hut is an iconic brand that is engrained in the hearts and minds of so many of our customers, we felt it was our job to make our creative reflect both the rich legacy of Pizza Hut, as well as nod to where we're headed." The Hut's Chief Brand Officer, Marianne Radley
From retail and tech to food and finance, a logo redesign can do a brand good. Which one is your favorite of these famous logo redesigns, or do you prefer the classics?
Think about what makes these logos so recognizable, easy to read, and understand. Look for inspiration online and start paying attention to the logos that stand out to you. Is it the simplicity, the color palette, the symbols? When you have your ideas ready, you can hire a professional logo designer to help or have them brainstorm with you. Happy branding.
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