Your logo is the bedrock of your brand’s entire visual identity. It is not just a symbol. The choices made by your logo design agency are more than iconography, typography, & color. In the past year, several big-name companies have revealed new and updated logos. Let’s look at some of the intelligent brand positioning and rationale behind these noteworthy changes to iconic designs.
New design
Old design
Burger King launched their first rebrand in over twenty years and turned back time to a more simple and traditional design that they hope highlights their most famous sandwich: “The Whopper.”
For the rebrand, Burger King removed the blue from the logo because “there’s no blue food,” said Global Chief Marketing Officer Fernando Machado. “Buns don’t shine,” so that had to go too. The logo felt “old,” and was “from a time when the design characteristics were trendy.” The brand worked to improve the proportions and font to make the classic design feel modern to accomplish a subtle yet substantial transformation.
Old Design
New Design
General Motors is emphasizing innovation moving forward; especially its electric vehicles. This new design puts the “gm” in lowercase letters “with the “m” underlined as a nod to its Ultium battery cell platform that will underpin its new EVs, said Deborah Wahl, GM’s chief marketing officer. The blue letters are inside a rounded box of the same color. It replaces a white “GM” underlined within a darker blue block. “The new logo also comes with a new tagline: “Everybody in.”
New Design
Old Design
KIA Motors joins GM with an even more dramatic shift from their relatively simple encircled red lettering,
to a much more abstract and striking design. This represents a risk for the automaker, as any big shift in logo design caries a risk of losing immediate recognize-ability. It would seem that KIA is banking on continuing their recent success and hoping to mirror it with this new logo as well. These are the types of decisions that the agency helping to design your logo can help with.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says, “We’re unlocking the pill to reveal Pfizer’s DNA,” with their new logo. On their new website, they state, “After 171 years, we arrive at a new era. A time of extraordinary focus on science and dedication to patients. Pfizer is no longer in the business of just treating diseases — we’re curing and preventing them.”
In order to realize the breakthroughs of the future, we’ve revolutionized how we work today. We’re unlocking the pill to reveal Pfizer’s DNA: the power of science. pic.twitter.com/NO0TWt6OVh
— Pfizer Inc. (@pfizer) January 5, 2021