While you were shopping — Ikea launched a new logotype.
As seen on design portal ‘brand new’ Ikea, the worlds largest furniture retailer, launched a new logotype recently. As obvious on the first glimpse, the design change was cautious, but was it a change for the future?
The briefing
Consulting the briefing, the new design was about redrawing the logotype for increased legibility. Transform the design in a way that digital and analogous touchpoints can be served best. A new registration of the trademark has to be avoided and further, the new design of the logotype may coexist well in proximity to the old brand signature of Ikea.
Changes made
Thus those modifications are clear and reasonable to transform the logotype to a new era of living and the coexistence of both design signatures might work well, some questions of the new branding might probably be still ongoing.
One might be: What about the kerning of the new word mark. Is there a reason why the ‘K’ is still not better bridging the gap to the ‘I’ to ensure a faster reading and increase legibility.
Also in terms of serving the logo for digital, like apps, social media, and further online related touchpoints the new design might still open the discussion for deriving a picture mark from the logo itself, to have a more straight forward impact on smaller digital applications.
When it comes to readability, improvements regarding the letter sizes and shortening of the miniature serifs have been made. Though integrating the registered mark into the type might not be the best fit for a direct and speedy recognition as it adds more complexity to the word mark itself and thus makes the logo harder to decipher, especially in small sizes.
At the end, logotypes, even those of global companies have to adapt to future challenges of the digital age. Every step to improve in this direction is a right one. Though the new design of the Ikea logotype leaves the question open to the beholder — was it worth the effort to ‘minimal redesign’ a hallmark of such a huge demanding and global acting design program? Is this logotype ready for the future?
About the author:
Tobias Wibbeke is a creative by heart and design enthusiast. After solving branding challenges for consultancies such as Landor Associates, Interbrand and Peter-Schmidt Group he decided to start his own mission to the moon and bring brands to life. As a partner of Persuaid, an agile branding and design studio, he aims to create holistic brand experiences and is constantly on the move to foster synergies between brand communication and customer experience.
