As a designer, every now and then you’ll get a client complain about their branding. Either they don’t like the color, the font or perhaps they think it doesn’t reflect the company. Either way, they have already set their minds on a redesign. But is throwing their entire identity out the window everytime you get a new idea? No. Definitely no.

Your logo is what sticks to your customer. It’s what your client remembers after he leaves your store or website. It has to inspire confidence in your product or service while representing your companies values. So it would make sense for companies to invest good money into a great logo. In fact, some have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions to create a logo that resonates with their vision.

So we’ve established that logos are important. Good. Then how come companies keep changing them? Well, there’a lot of reasons why a company might choose to update their branding and logo. Maybe they pivoted and offer a different product or service. Maybe the logo didn’t age well. Maybe they want to reach a different audience. Maybe it’s because the old logo was made by the founder’s twelve-year-old nephew who is good with computers. Truth be told, the reason is not important. The execution is.

Now that we got that out of the way let’s talk about how you’d go about getting a new brand. Depending on how major are the changes to your old brand you either find yourself doing a complete rebranding or a brand refresh.

1. Rebranding

This is what most people think of when they think new logo and that’s not a bad thing. There’s a number of reason why a company might go for a redesign. A change in focus, product or service. A big merger. Age. All valid reasons.

What’s important to understand is that everytime you redesign your logo, you will reset the company image that the customers are already used to. So think long and hard before you jump that gun.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words I’m going to show you a couple of rebranding examples

Crackle.com

Crackle is a US-based video entertainment provider launched in 2004 and brought to you many great shows including Comedians in cars drinking coffee with Jerry Seinfeld.

Sony acquired Crackle and wanted to represent the merger of the two companies with a brand new logo that has both names. Not everyone loves the new logo but at least there was an idea behind it.

Dashbird.io

Launched in 2017, Dashbird.io is an AWS Lambda performance monitoring tool that helps companies keep costs low while providing actionable information about their serverless environments.

2. Brand refresh

A brand refresh is a great idea when  you just need a breath of fresh air to your company’s branding. The idea is not to have major modifications to the logo, keeping the original idea and feel behind it while playing with the more subtle things, like shade of colors, lines and shadows. This sounds easy but refreshing the look of your brand could be tricky. Here are two brand refresh examples that are worth mentioning.

Google.com

Mailchimp.com

There you have it. I hope this will provide a little insight into what goes through the mind of a designer when put face to face with the task of updating a companies logo. If you have any examples that you think are worth mentioning please leave a comment below.