My take on 9Mobile’s logo
This boy has come again!
Hear me out.
I’m not here to rain down fire and brimstone on a logo’s design just because it doesn’t fit my design style & tastes.
I’m not here to show you my redesign and go like “Hey, hey, look at my new shiny logo. Like it and tell me great I am”
No.
I’m just here to share my thoughts on what i think happened and what might happen.
Months ago, when it hit the news that Etisalat Nigeria had gone broke (like, wait, you’re multi-national telco, how on earth do you do that without dashing me small? Haba!), It shook a lot of ground. The negotiations with the banks had fallen apart. Emirates Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) directed Etisalat Nigeria to stop using its brand name within the next three weeks, leaving the company with very limited options.
Now I don’t know the full story, but I’m guessing the creative agency (unconfirmed sources point fingers at X3M Ideas) had a very very tight deadline to produce a “rolling” rebranding campaign that had to match the customer (re)onboarding & migration to the last dot. And I’m sure it must have been war to settle on this logo.
What do I think of this logo?
When I first saw it, I sorta surprised myself by not writing it off. I instantly understood that they had a crazy time constraint (because nobody plans for their company running out of money) and had to rollout very quickly so as not to create a communication gap between the brand and it’s huge customer base. They had already lost 4Million customers. Anymore screw ups and people would go sideways in droves.
It’s not particularly the best Identity out there. It’s not the worst Identity either. It’s an Identity that, i’m guessing, was created to solve an immediate business need and it solved it perfectly well.
Even if you don’t rate the logo, You’ve got to admire how they applied it to their communication materials.
How it scales itself into the future? No one knows. Nor do a lot of people care. All they want is better service from a telco company that truly cares for them and wants to help them communicate and succeed in their day-to-day and if this is the new face tied to the brand that gives it to them, then so be it.
So I made mine…
I have nothing but respect for the creative people behind the new Identity, but when a creative itch needs scratching, it’s hard to resist. Plus I had planned to release this before 9Mobile launched their logo.
I wanted to do something polymeric: a single design that means different things to different people.
— I wanted people to see a caring brand.
— I wanted people to see a brand determined to uplift them and make them succeed.
— Yeah, there’s also that 9. You have to see the 9.
I’d like to thank the creative community for their awesome support and invaluable feedback. I learnt a thing or two about shutting up and listening to feedback, what people expect to see from the perspective of the customer, and designing for context (especially this one.)
I’m currently working with a team of amazing people on the PlayKit-UI, an open source UI Kit that’d help Designers, Developers and Product owners collaborate almost seamlessly while helping them push out their ideas quickly. Join Us.
