The Starbucks Logo Has A Secret You’ve Never Noticed
Look closely at the Siren. She looks perfect. But by design, she’s not.
Her eyes command a warm confidence. Her hair ripples as an ocean wave that laps provocatively over her breasts. As the face of Starbucks since 2011, the Siren logo is alluring by design, beckoning you into the store to grab a latte or pastry. Her face is so perfect, it is its own mirror, with the left and right sides copied to match up like a Rorschach test.
But when the global branding team at Lippincott was staring at her on a wall seven years ago, she just didn’t work–and they didn’t know why. She wasn’t beautiful; she was uncannily beautiful, a bit creepy, to be honest, giving you a funny feeling in your stomach like she was a shell of a person, like an alien or robot pretending to be a human.
“As a team we were like, ‘There’s something not working here, what is it?’” recounts global creative director Connie Birdsall. “It was like, ‘Oh, we need to step back and put some of that humanity back in. The imperfection was important to making her really successful as a mark.”
Specifically, Lippincott realized that to look human, the Siren couldn’t be symmetrical, despite the fact that symmetry is the well-studied definition…
