Most Influential Redesigns of 2017
A Closer LOOK AT THE DESIGNS THAT SHAPED 2017
This was an amazing year for design. As a designer it is becoming more and more apparent that our industry is in an awesome place. The cliche of a starving artist seems to have moved away to job boards having numerous postings for design talent. No matter the industry design is becoming a more important factor as brands compete for attention across shelf space, advertisements, home screens, app stores, websites, social media accounts, or in everyday life. Below are some of the most influential redesigns of the year.
Chobani
It’s hard to think a company’s rebranding could feel like a blockbuster movie, but newly hired Cheif Creative Officer, Leland Laschmeyer, and his in-house team of designers were able to launch a new look and logo that had designers around the world on the edge of their seat. The reason a greek yogurt company could become the best branding is multi-faceted, but it starts with Chobani the product, the founder, the company, and the design all seeming unified on one vision. If Steve Jobs and Apple embody simplicity, then Chobani embodies authenticity. It didn’t take long for Chobani yogurt to quickly disrupt shelves of sugarfilled grab and go yogurt marketed with their bright flashy colors to capture the attention of an 8-year old. Now a healthy, naturally crafted product has an artistically crafted branding and packaging to match the spirit of the company. Moments like this are rare in design, but it feels like Chobani found a perfect new visual identity.
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Dropbox
The team at Dropbox along with the design agency Collins produced another of the year’s hit redesigns. The whimsical illustrations of the original Dropbox will go down as some of the best & most unique start up branding, but like most redesigns, this new look signifies a change in the company. The cloud storage provider filed to go public in early 2018 and needed a new look to appeal to a wider audience. Not only was it a shift from targeting just the students or startups of the world, but Dropbox began to introduce new products and features to its platform. The company went on record saying that it wants you to think of it not “only a place to store your files” but a “living workspace where people and ideas come together” - you can see this duality play out in the composition of its website, its advertising, its photography, and its color combinations.
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Ebay
Ah I miss the glory days of ebay and online auctions. The bright blue apple computer, the sound of a dial up modem, AOL’s “you’ve got mail” voice, and ebay’s auction countdown are all distinct memories to an era of my childhood. It’s amazing to see how ebay has transformed itself to become an all-encompassing e-commerce platform like Amazon that enables everyday people and businesses to sell their products (or junk from their garage) online quickly and easily. This new look and color palette definitely feels like ebay trying to shed some it’s old skin and reintroduce themselves to a younger, hipper, more modern audience that isn’t just on the site to purchase collectables. Keeping the classic wordmark design agency Form& chose to focus on other elements to breath new life into the brand. Simply by introducing fresher colors, adding motion, and modernizing the photography the advertising suddenly feels like it belongs rather than calling back to distant memories of dial up modems.
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IBM Watson
How do you give artificial intelligence an identity? The men and women over at IBM have been thinking about this everyday for years and it is amazing to see the innovation and success of the Watson division. The new logo is a streamlined version of its predecessor and perfectly embodies a three-dimensional space using both color, gradient, and fade. Just from shape and color the audience can tell it is complex, it is moving, it is thinking, and that alone is a great feat achieved by the designers. Once the logo begins to animate and take form in IBM’s advertising and videos is when this redesign really comes to life. Some truly amazing work.
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Kickstarter
Not only is Kickstarter an amazing company, with an awesome new identity, the story behind the creation is even better. Back in 2015 two designers started a kickstarter project, that turned into a storefront in New York, that lead to them quitting their jobs at Pentagram to start a design agency called Order… who then teamed up with Kickstarter’s design team to reinvent their new identity. Talk about coming full circle!
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Mozilla
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization most widely known for the Firefox browser, had one of the wildest rethinkings of a corporate identity I’ve ever seen. It all happened real-time, crowdsourced for feedback, and ultimately left it in the hands of their users to dictate design decisions often reserved for the highest executives. “What made this project stand-out, right from the off, was Mozilla’s determination that, as an open source software company, they should also rebrand ‘in the open’.” Johnson Banks, the design agency used to champion the redesign goes on to talk about the process and ultimately selecting the winner, “Eventually, the idea that used the internet protocol won through. It is a simple and memorable idea which neatly represents how people and knowledge are linked in an increasingly connected world, and it resonates well with their core internal and external audiences. The final design step involved ‘rebooting’ the idea from its two previous iterations in order to reach the final outcome, which you see here.”
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City of Boston
We need more projects like this. A major city reached out to the legendary design firm IDEO for assistance on recreating the brand for the city of Boston. An entire city getting its own look and logo, how amazing is that. Suddenly the signage, the stationary, the tourism advertising all have a cohesive brand. Just take a look at the project on IDEO’s page and you’ll see the extent this branding covered, all the way down to hundreds of custom icons made for the city. It would be amazing to see young designers take on projects like this instead of the countless examples seen on Behance or Dribbble of popular website redesigns like Craigslist, LinkedIn, Facebook, but what if all those designers reached out to local businesses, non profits, or city websites instead. What would the branding of your city look like?
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Hyundai
The Hyundai and Audi redesigns are great examples of brands, especially auto brands, moving away from skeuomorphic designs and adopting the growing trend for flat logo design. This makes sense as logos begin to appear at all sizes on numerous layouts & devices. A flat logo can scale down to an app icon or banner ad, but the photo realistic shading of chrome metal needs to be set on white to stand out and large enough to be understood. The company’s in-house design group, Creative Works, understands the importance of an instantly recognizable icon - especially when the brand rolls out plans to become a title sponsor for the NFL placing it in front of millions of eye balls every Sunday.
Audi
In retrospect it feels weird that auto brands like Audi and Hyundai didn’t have flat versions of their logos. Take a look at the gorgeous brand portal that details the redesign by German design firms Strichpunkt and KMS TEAM. Suddenly the four rings of the logo can become design elements used to crop photos, add energy, and ultimately give the Audi marketing division much more freedom of expression to build off an already instantly identifiable logomark.
Look & Logo is a project dedicated to the design thinking that fuels creative visual identities, brands, and logos. Follow along on Twitter or Instagram to see the latest looks & logos. If there is work you would like to see featured, want to talk design, or just want to say hi, feel free to get in touch.