The Tyranny Of An Updated Logo

Your virtual workspace just got revamped. The popular workplace chat app, Slack now has a new logo. The familiar hash logo is now replaced with a redesigned version that retains the original color scheme.

While Slack itself has been going on about how it really needed a change because the old logo was not cohesive on different platforms and it had 11 different colors and how the new one symbolizes the “simplicity and ease of use” Slack is all about, it has been the reaction to the change by users all around the world that has been more interesting.

Some criticized the “simplicity” of the design, some compared it to ducks, some made even cruder comparisons. Though there were people who decided that they sort of liked it after staring at it for a good few minutes, the reaction has been largely negative.

Slack isn’t the first victim of criticism over logo redesign. Brands have forever been presenting logos to negative reception since they came into existence somewhere around 1885. But it’s amusing to note how a logo usually doesn’t garner as much attention on its own as it does once it’s changed and the said change doesn’t go down well.

Popular Victims

Yahoo is perhaps the most popular victim of redesign fails. Mostly because it made a huge deal of it — in fact, it created a 30 days countdown just to deliver a disappointment. The new logo wasn’t bad per se, but it was nowhere near as exciting as the new logo and the brand itself positioned itself as.

Gap did the exact opposite. It changed its logo without any warning. It was bad — people reacted strongly. The brand had to explain that the logo was crowdsourced and nothing was final. After just 6 days of facing criticism, it reverted back to its old iconic logo like nothing ever happened. And all this just cost 100 million bucks.

Then we have Oxford Dictionaries of all brands that managed to screw up a perfectly fine logo. It let go of its classic business feel to give way for a logo clearly designed to appeal to the Twitter crowd, not knowing Oxford is not the dictionary they go to for definitions.

Why A Change Is Needed?

At the end of the day, the question arises as to why brands spend so much to revamp perfectly fine logos and are even quick to revert back to them when they cop criticism for it. Why does logo redesigning matter?

The answer to that is probably the same as or at least tied in with why logos matter.

Logos are important to your brand’s identity. They give consumers a symbol to be recognized and attached to your brand without even the need to know its name.

If you don’t have a good logo for yourself as of yet, you should get onto it.

But if you do have one, you need to make sure it stays relevant to where your business is heading. As you explore new markets and your company changes and expands, your brand identity will need a shakeup too — including the logo. Maybe there is too much competition and they’ve all got similar logos. Or maybe yours has been the same forever and you just want change (Nike would disagree). Even Slack’s reasoning stands justified.

What really makes that change worthwhile is that the new logo should be better than its predecessor.

Can Fails Be Avoided?

Such a question can never have a direct answer in a creative field like this. Art is subjective. What caught the fancy of the decision makers of Slack’s logo redesign certainly did not of the internet.

There are usually two ways to go about it — refreshing or redesigning. Animal Planet completely rehauled its logo in 2018 but Coca-cola only tweaks it once in a while to maintain the original look.

Refreshing is, of course, a safer course of action and can give you the taste of what to expect if and when you do decide to revamp it. But if it’s a new identity you are looking for, redesign it is. Creating a few different versions to get a better array of options works best, so does asking for as many opinions as you can — but there are surely better ways to do that than Yahoo! Or Slack.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +412,714 people.

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