One fine day, I logged into Facebook as I do every hour, and caught myself staring at the logo. Considering it was Facebook, I had spare time and decided to redesign the logo, thinking of it as a quick job. One hour and a couple of glasses of coke in, and mercilessly pulling my own hair, I had nothing to show for it on my screen. This seemingly small incident surprised me more than it upset me. Even though options were available to switch among around a thousand fonts, millions of colour variants, and plenty of other features, I failed to come up with a good alternative logo, and meanwhile decided to explore the challenges and prerequisites that come with re-branding.
It leads to more creativity, and compels us to do more than recycle designs from the internet. Rebranding is a chance to change with the need to, and gain a necessary sense of accomplishment. Moreover, it helps us experience how designing would be under limitations and regulations, which will ultimately help us succeed in our design careers. Designing is a journey that helps us change and learn, and the rebranding process is a process through which our community grows.
Re-branding: Challenges and Prerequisites
One fine day, I logged into Facebook as I do every hour, and caught myself staring at the logo. Considering it was Facebook, I had spare time and decided to redesign the logo, thinking of it as a quick job. One hour and a couple of glasses of coke in, and mercilessly pulling my own hair, I had nothing to show for it on my screen. This seemingly small incident surprised me more than it upset me. Even though options were available to switch among around a thousand fonts, millions of colour variants, and plenty of other features, I failed to come up with a good alternative logo, and meanwhile decided to explore the challenges and prerequisites that come with re-branding.
The process of rebranding makes us realise how successful companies have been in imprinting their logos in our mind, and this is essentially the biggest challenge that lies in front of us. We are so used to the current logos that anything else feels…unnatural. Another technical hurdle is the limited scope: We have to adhere to a set scheme of colours, fonts, and proportions at all times. This is opposite to what we experience designing from scratch, simply a white canvas and innumerable possibilities. Leaving aside the science, creative personnel encounter a barrier unrelated to the physical work, namely the adoption of a philosophical outlook. If we aim to redesign an already aesthetically pleasing logo, we need good reason. This reason, more often than not, is in form of a philosophical one, a change which lets the logo connect better with the target audience. For example,
https://medium.com/art-marketing/the-new-google-logo-rounded-off-45db0524b46f
-Gyan Lakhwani
(Image of the Rounded off and the Original Logo and the reason behind the change)
Luckily, the perquisites outweigh the challenges. Most importantly, the process pulls us out of the conventional designing process and makes us learn more than we ever can. It leads to more creativity, and compels us to do more than recycle designs from the internet. Rebranding is a chance to change with the need to, and gain a necessary sense of accomplishment. Moreover, it helps us experience how designing would be under limitations and regulations, which will ultimately help us succeed in our design careers. Designing is a journey that helps us change and learn, and the rebranding process is a process through which our community grows.
For instance, this redesign of gaana.com’s logo uses a font which is beautifully geometric and has a forwardness appearance. The italicized font style also indicates motion in music. The more circular g and a symbolize openness and harmony. The icon is the first thing one sees when one downloads an application, and since gaana is a hindi word, gaana.com can utilise this identity to connect with its target audience. Visually, the Hindi letter ga resembles musical notes.
(Courtesy: Anand Chowdhary, tiny.cc/anandc)
Tanmay Bansal