As a business owner, figuring out how best to convey your brand in a single image is often no easy feat. If you’ve taken advantage of 99designs’ popular polling feature when running a contest, you may have been surprised by the feedback from your friends and colleagues. We often hear from customers that the design they thought was hands-down the best was not, in fact, the design everyone else preferred!
Rebranding once you’re a well-established company offers its own set of challenges. Arby’s just introduced its new logo, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Venessa Wong asked 99designs to weigh in for her article, “What Do Pro Designers Think of Arby’s New Logo?” The fast-food outlet is just the latest example of an iconic brand revamping to mixed reviews. (The Gap’s logo redesign fiasco in 2010 is perhaps the most blatant example of this, and eBay’s new logo has also received its share of criticism. In fact, we’re currently running a contest asking our design community to show us how they’d rework the eBay logo, and have gotten some great submissions!)
Take a look at the old and new logos, side by side.
We thought we’d share a few excerpts from the article. What do you think – do you agree with our Lead Visual Designer Kyle Lin?
As it approaches its 50th anniversary in 2014, Atlanta-based restaurant chain Arby’s has redesigned its iconic cowboy hat logo and launched a new ad campaign about “slicing up freshness”…
But just how good is the new design? Well, Bloomberg Businessweek asks four design professionals—99designs’ lead visual designer Kyle Lin, Little Red House’s design partner Michelle Gamble, Rivington Design House’screative director Brion Isaacs, and Pratt Institute’sGraduate Communications Design Department adjunct professor Graham Hanson—what they think about Arby’s new, digital-looking logo:
Kyle Lin: Overall, I think it’s a vast improvement from the “before” logo. It has youthful, casual appeal. I like how they brought in modernized aspects of their older branding in updated ways. The new apostrophe’s supposed to represent a meat-cutting blade, which works well with their new positioning. Gotta love the hat.
To read commentary from the other experts, check out the full article. And we’d love to hear your thoughts – which do you prefer? Have you faced challenges in introducing a redesigned logo to your customers?
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The new logo looks great. The only thing I’d change would be the ‘a’… Think it shoud be a capital letter.
They should have ran a contest at 99 and saved themselves alot of money and I’m certain they would have had a better outcome guaranteed! A “Meat Slicer?” glad you cleared that up… I don’t think you should ever place a “Meat Slicer” that close to your “Phallus Hat”
Prefer the new color and 3D hat. If customers find out that the meat slicer is the apostrophe, they will think it is cool. Without the shine marks it is just an ordinary apostrophe that is not as well integrated as the original.
I never liked Arby’s cowboy hat. I prefer a Stetson myself.