Brand Re-versioning: Logos That Will Mess With Your Mind

We have come to know the giants on the Internet and their logos as something that is part of our daily lives, at least if you spend your hours working through the Internet. Their logos have been etched into our minds, and we can tell them apart in an instant when we see them flash by as we’re surfing the interwebs. It’s hard to imagine them looking any different, and if they were ever to change, we would most likely not appreciate them as much since it would mean that we had to etch the new one over the old one in our mind, and that can take time.

It’s almost like following someone on Twitter. If you spend time each day on Twitter, and you have been following someone for a while, you begin to know that person by his or her avatar. What happens when that person or brand changes their picture or logo? Well, you will have the ultimate challenge of finding them in your Twitter stream again.

This is of course troublesome, and there is a large percentage of people who dislike changes in avatars. But as with anything, changing an avatar or logo is a double-edged sword. It could go horribly wrong, which would lead to loss of followers or customers, but it might also mean a positive change. It all depends on how you execute the change I guess. This is something that designer Graham Smith (a guy that I have been following for a long time on Twitter, @imjustcreative) has been looking further into.

The switching of brand colors, fonts and execution has lead to a mash-up of the brand logos of the most successful brands on the Internet. You don’t see anything wrong immediately, but your mind is telling you something is wrong, but you aren’t sure what it is. After a while, you start understanding the errors, and your brain silently wraps itself around the changes. It’s almost like when you read the YELLOW which is written in blue. It messes with your mind if you were to say the colors of the text instead of what it says in text. It’s an engaging thought and a brilliant way to showcase the importance of a strong and unchanged brand image.