The ride hailing company giant Uber surprised everyone on Tuesday a rebranded logo for both its apps was unveiled. Since yesterday Uber passengers as well as partners couldn’t find their typical black and white “U” icon, but rather a more corporative looking logo.
With this sudden change of their image, Uber intends to personalize and customize the logo’s background according to the country they’re operating within. For example, the U.S. will see deep blue, India bright turquoise, China deep red, alongside 66 other variations of the background.
Communications designer Catherine Ray, apparently inspired by the small square tiles in her bathroom, created this new design. The partner and rider geometric icons will remain the same (Circular, for riders, and hexagonal for drivers, both of them surrounding a square). It seems as if Uber separated clients in basic shapes of Bits and Atoms, accordingly.
Now, as the new rider and partner icon from Uber have a futuristic and modern feel to it, the new image has taken a lot of heat on the Internet. In spite of this as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Although Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick can be anxious for the reaction of the users, making his company a trending topic this week already succeeds him.
Travis is probably anxious to know how the users embraced the company’s rebranding, according to a Wired Magazine publishing. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says, “but I feel that is going to be good.” There’s no doubt that Uber’s corporate rebranding is also an attempt to target a much higher group of people and make a reputation for itself.
As a startup company worth $62 billion, which is skyrocketing through the roof at the moment, it appears the timing for a corporate rebrand was just ideal. Uber is quickly becoming a corporate role model as the world’s largest taxi company without owning a single vehicle. Although is important to remember that countless lawsuits and regulatory roadblocks have kept Uber from becoming a stable company.
Travis Kalanick has changed the world by being able to get Uber introduced in over 400 cities in 68 countries, all since 2010, when the company first went public. Most CEOs don’t get personally involved in the designing aspects of the rebranding, but Kalanick is not like most CEOs. Rebranding agencies didn’t design Uber’s new logo, nor branding agencies, the task was tackled by Uber’s communication designer in collaboration with Travis himself.
Source: WIRED