UBER just launched a brand new company logo along with a new design refresh across its apps and services. The logo will be taking the place of the original grey ‘U’ Logo with a black background.
“Our new look and feel celebrates both our technology and the cities we serve.” Travis Kalanick, CEO of UBER said in a press release, “We began as a premium, black car service in just a handful of cities. And when we replaced our red magnet logo with the black badge four years ago, we weren’t just young and in a hurry—we were a fundamentally different company. We were “everyone’s private driver.” Now, Uber helps people explore 400 destinations in 68 countries. Our technology helps deliver food, packages, and people, all at the touch of a button. With options like uberX and uberPOOL we’ve gone from luxury to affordable luxury to an everyday transportation alternative.”
Uber’s new logo is a circle with a square box being stretched out from a line. But Uber does have an explanation. The square in the centre is called the “”Bit” which will appear across the company’s platform.
As Uber expands its services from a ride sharing service to other forms of services such as Food delivery service, the bit in the logo helps Uber add additional products to its company portfolio as time goes by. “This updated design reflects where we’ve been, and where we’re headed. The Uber you know isn’t changing, our brand is just catching up to who we already were.”
Travis himself was personally involved in the new design creation process for his company. According to an inside story talking about the rebranding on Wired magazine, “Kalanick is not a designer… Yet he refused to entrust the rebranding process to someone else. This was an unusual decision, on his part. When overhauling the identify of their company, most CEOs hire experts—branding agencies that specialize in translating corporate values into fonts and colors—or assign the task to an in-house design team. Not Kalanick. For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalim Amin and a dozen-or-so other folks, hammering out ideas from a poorly ventilated space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.””
Apart from the new logo and design, Uber has also chose a new typeface for the UBER word mark which is now a basic sans serif font compared to the previous curled ‘U’. Uber claims that the new typeface will enable people to recognize its brand from afar.
