In design you're always tempted by the blank page moment. With every briefing you want a fresh start. Creating a new logo, new colours, new typography. Ideally all at once. Somehow it would feel wrong to stick with what already exists. Like you're not doing your job properly.
With the willhaben rebrand, it was no different. Except that, after letting go of our own assumptions, it led somewhere unexpected. willhaben is Austria's largest classifieds platform, covering second-hand goods, real estate, vehicles, and jobs. A brand so familiar to almost all Austrians that it's simply part of everyday life. And that, as it turned out, was the key.
Do your homework first
Basing a design on evidence is what separates a rebrand that truly connects with people from one that just looks new. So before a single design decision was made, Mutabor ran large-scale user research, a thorough look at how real users actually experience the brand, what they recognise, what sticks, and what they feel.
The results were clear. Of all willhaben's visual assets, one element stood out as by far the most important recognition marker: not the typography, not the visual language, not even the colours. It was a magnifying glass, a small, unpretentious symbol, wrapped like an outline around the wordmark. It had so far lived a quiet life as an unassuming element in the corner of designs. True to the idea that evidence matters more than ego, we let go of our own assumptions. But that was exactly what changed everything.
Why iconicity earns the right to boldness
It is quite simple: Austria's most famous magnifying glass is from willhaben. An icon. The true heart of the brand. Iconic assets like this make designers nervous. Push them too far and you risk breaking something people genuinely love. Leave them untouched and they start collecting dust.
The temptation in any rebrand is almost always to invent your way to relevance, to justify your presence through novelty. With willhaben, we chose balance over novelty: keeping what people love, evolving what needed to grow. So we put the iconic magnifying glass, carefully redesigned, at the centre and built the entire new corporate identity outward from there, consistently and systematically.
A magnifying glass? An entire universe!
What sounds paradoxical at first makes complete sense on closer inspection: precisely because the magnifying glass was already iconic, we had the licence to be bold with it. To play with it, have fun with it, flex with it, integrate it playfully into layouts, and push it in terms of texture and form. Or break it down into the smallest parts.
The research had provided the proof. Push an unfamiliar symbol that far and it reads as arbitrary. But a symbol that millions of people carry in their minds can not only withstand radical simplification, it actually benefits from it. Follow that idea far enough and it becomes clear: the magnifying glass is everywhere. It's not just the logo; it is the entire design principle.
The new custom typeface draws its rounded, generous details directly from the shape of the lens. Icons and illustrations follow the same logic. As a compositional device, the magnifying glass adapts to any format, frames content and gives the system its rhythm. From the app interface to the billboard, from the favicon to the campaign. Everything speaks the same language. Look closely enough and you'll find the magnifying glass everywhere. It’s that simple. And precisely because of that impossible to ignore.
Sometimes the boldest move is recognising what was already there and finally giving it the stage it deserves.
Partners:
The new willhaben corporate design was developed by Mutabor in 2026. Research and testing were conducted in partnership with DECODE.
