On the day a new logo design is launched for a familiar brand, the first reactions are usually overwhelmingly negative. Once some time has passed and the new design has entered daily use, though, it can be a different story.
So here we take a look back at the 20 biggest brands to release a new logo in 2013. Make sure you also see our guide to the biggest logo design trends of the year.
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01. American Airlines
Created by Futurebrand (opens in new tab), a brand new American Airlines logo was launched at the beginning of 2013. The new design meant a sad goodbye to the classic Helvetica logo designed by Vignelli Associates (opens in new tab) which had been in service since 1967 (shown below).
02. ITV
Also in January, the UK's second biggest broadcaster launched its rebrand. While many logos became more stripped back and minimalist this year, the new ITV logo, which was created by Rudd Studio (opens in new tab) with the assistance of Fontsmith (opens in new tab), went in the opposite direction, with the addition of curves and colour.
03. VH1
Another TV channel to rebrand in January, VH1's new logo was its first in years and now incorporated a '+1'. The music and reality TV channel, which worked with Gretel (opens in new tab) on its new identity, said the name change signified how VH1 had become "the ultimate mash up of music + pop culture + nostalgia".
04. Brooklyn Library
Why would a library misspell its own name? The new branding for the public library in Brooklyn, New York (opens in new tab) included a new logo which reinvented its name as 'Bklyn' - a subtle pun on the text speak-age abbreviation for book ('bk'). The new design, created by Eight and a Half (opens in new tab), also reduces down better on mobile devices than its predecessor.
05. South Australia
This new logo, released in February to promote South Australia, depicts a stylised map of the whole country in red, with the state depicted in ochre as a door. The new design, created by Ken Cato of Cato Partners (opens in new tab), replaces the old star-based logo (below). South Australia premier Jay Weatherill said he wanted a new brand campaign because he was tired of people overseas confusing South Australia with South Africa.
06. Spotify
Above is the new logo music streaming giant Spotify (opens in new tab) slapped across its website in March. The globe emblem lost much of its styling, most noticeably the shadow effect, to give it a more two-dimensional look. Overall, the look was of a company that wanted to look more grown-up and professional, and in that sense it was reminiscent of the previous year's eBay logo update (opens in new tab).
07. Doritos
Tortilla chip brand Doritos released this new logo and packaging in March, giving itself a unified global identity for the first time ever. The new look was designed by PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division in partnership with Hornall Anderson (opens in new tab), whose UK team visited cities across the world to find out how to best achieve an emotional connection with its core demographic of teens and young adults.
08. Facebook
The biggest logo redesign of the year in terms of brand reach was in other ways the most minor. In fact, most Facebook users probably didn't notice any difference when it introduced this new logo (above) in April earlier this month. The two changes were the lack of shading and the way the bottom of the 'f' now disappears into negative space.
09. GitHub
GitHub (opens in new tab), the popular social network for web developers and programmers, also updated its visual identity in April, with a new logo (above) that was much more formal looking than its predecessor (below), changing the title from all-lowercase to camel case (opens in new tab) and removing the 'social coding' tag of the old logo design (below).
10. Commonwealth Games 2016
Okay, not exactly a redesign but as there is a new interpretation of what is meant by the Olympic brand identity every four years it's included. The Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games revealed its logo in a ceremony in Queensland, Australia this April. The colours symbolise the Gold Coast's beaches, water and hinterland. Whatever you think of it, it's certainly less controversial than the London 2012 logo (opens in new tab).
11. 2018 Winter Olympics
2013 also saw the launch of the official logo for the Winter Olympics in Korea in 2018 (see above for the explanation behind the broadening of the 'redesign' remit...). Created by HA Jong-Joo, the design incorporates the five traditional Korean colours. The main symbol is a combination of the Korean characters which spell the 'P' sound (for Pyeong) and the 'ch' sound (of Chang).
12. Instagram
The clear 2013 trend for logo designs was to design a simpler, flatter and more professional piece of branding. Case in point is the new Instagram (opens in new tab)logo. It was an evolutionary update, retaining the instantly-recognizable Instagram script's look. Designer Mackey Saturday (opens in new tab) said. "It was always essential that the design maintained everything that we've all grown to know and love about Instagram while creating a logotype that was more refined, durable, and that positioned the brand for expansion."
13. Mall of America
The world's largest retail complex, Mall of America (opens in new tab) celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2013, and to mark the occasion it released a new logo design. Created by local agency Duffy & Partners (opens in new tab), it was a big departure from the previous logo (below), based on dynamic-looking star design with bright colours designed to be interchangeable.
14. MailChimp
Jessica Hische (opens in new tab) has many fans amongst lovers of typography (opens in new tab) and in July she was asked to tackle a logo redesign for newsletter platform MailChimp (opens in new tab). "They didn’t want to do a massive overhaul," Hische explained, "they just wanted to give their current mark a facelift." Hische lightened the weight overall and improved the vector drawing, with the letterforms revised for legibility, especially at small sizes.
15. Hooters
Breast-obsessed restaurant chain Hooters is one of the US's top brands and a uniquely American institution. Much like the concept itself, the company's logo (below) served for 30 years as an example of a design that shouldn't work, but does. In July, though, Atlanta design firm Sky Design (opens in new tab) gave it a more modern streamlined look (above), although the essential details remained, including the cartoon typography, the owl and the double-entendre use of the bird's eyes.
16. TGI Fridays
TGI Fridays released this new, cleaner and more contemporary-looking logo design this summer. Created by Edinburgh-based agency Teviot (opens in new tab) the new logo retained the trademark colour scheme and stripes of the old (below), but the new design was now far more streamlined inside a simple rectangle. The letters are now all in capitals, rather than the mixture of sentence case and title case of the previous design, and the punctuation has all gone - even the apostrophe in "Friday's".
17. Yahoo
Marissa Mayer, one of 20 original employees in the early days of Google, was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo in July 2012 and wasted no time in stamping her authority on the company. Her latest scheme, dubbed '30 days of Yahoo logos', involved releasing 30 new logos (opens in new tab) over August and September - one per day.
The final, permanent logo (above) was released on the final day. Using the font Optima and the colour Pantone Violet C, it was a much cleaner design compared to the original (below), while retaining elements such as the exclamation mark, the slightly enlarged second 'O' and the purple colour that had been in place since 2009.
But that wasn't all. Mayer wrote a controversial blog post (opens in new tab) in which she described how she and a team created the new logo over the course of a weekend. But this incensed some (opens in new tab) professional designers and typographers with what they perceived as a glib and overly mathematical attitude to the design process. Such was the uproar that one interviewer (opens in new tab) can be seen on video asking her, to her face: "What the **** happened here?".
18. Google
After a few weeks of confusion, with Google's new logo (above) accidentally being released into the wild (opens in new tab), the search giant finally rolled it out on its homepage in September. In tandem with the trend for flat design (opens in new tab), the shadows of the old logo (below) were flattened.
However, don't accuse Google of making a knee-jerk reaction to the flat design trend - this 'new' logo had actually been in use on internal company documents for years.
19. Bing
We waited years for a new search engine logo, then three turned up in the same month. Along with Yahoo and Google, Microsoft threw its hat into the redesign ring with this striking new logo design for Bing (above). Cast in a customised version of Microsoft's Segoe font, the identity ditched the trademark blue of the old design (below) for golden orange - the exact hue that Microsoft uses in one quarter of its own flag-like logo.
20. Philips
Leading Dutch technology company Philips (opens in new tab) unveiled this new logo and identity across the entire brand in November. Based on the strapline 'innovation and people', the new shield logo harked back to the company's original logo design back in 1934. But this new look shield had curvier aspects to it, with thicker and softer lines throughout.
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What do you think of the logos unveiled in 2013? Let us know in the comments box below!
