Uber rebrand (uber.design)
5 years ago from Carlos Px, carlospx.com
5 years ago from Carlos Px, carlospx.com
Uber rebland
How is this the top comment on this thread?
Yeesh…
I thought it was one of those joke sites The Artist Formerly Known as Visual Idiot used to make.
How to completely remove personality from brand.
Good execution but the tone is so pretentious… "As a brand, we believe movement ignites opportunity.". "Our typography is as unique and easy to use as we are". This bland corporate-speak takes away any goodwill the otherwise very nice case study might have generated in me. Reading this it sounds like they think they invented the letter U and the color black…
Interviewed at Uber in 016. Got an offer and ended up not joining. The vibe I got from the company culture is exactly that. A pretentious design team, full of ego, won't got in detail since it's inappropriate to do this publicly. Not surprised that it translated into their rebrand. As a side note I do like the simplicity of this rebrand. The previous one was a disaster.
I've been on the receiving end of a pitch at Wolff Ollins, and their suits talk exactly like that. It's actually really impressive how they can sell you absolutely terrible designs and convince you it's good.
In response to all the Meh reactions: this an atonement re-brand.
Imagine they had come out with a really exciting concept and bold execution. The reception would be all about their shady business practices and dreadful company culture. This design shows they are taking a low profile.
They shed the visual flourishes of the previous identity as a stand-in for their past transgressions. And they kept only black and a pared down word mark which stands for the service value proposition, nothing more.
Expect another re-brand in a few year. And don't be fooled, their strategy is still to kill any competition by subsidizing rides until they are the only one standing.
Bam, nailed it. Emasculation by design on this one, and yet they still couldn't help themselves by comparing their brand to state & federal utilities which just reeks of world domination.
The U Frame is a pretty clever idea.
The U frame is a ret-conned way to make literally any image/copy lockup be acceptable within the "brand." By saying it's on-brand to crop into the U at literally any point and in any ratio, they can have literally any ratio of image to white-space they want except for having white-space above the image.
Yeah some of the guides are pretty ridiculous, this one in particular got me: http://cloud.ubbedall.com/01bfd683f2c8
Oh wow the composition of the full-bleed image is derived from the U, so cohesive...
Heroku application error. Wah wah.
This feels as vanilla as can be. While the design of the typography is clean, and the executions definitely help sell the idea, the branding is underwhelming and forgettable. It's quite a stretch with the U frame in the billboards and signage. It's less clever and more okayyy.
I dunno. Missed opportunity here to really shine with something unique.
If "vanilla" was their aim (so they can shrink into the background), sounds like they were pretty successful :)
With the U frame, I felt like they actually missed an opportunity to "own" the U shape by rounding out the bottom of the content area. As it is, it looks like a Portrait-mode ad for an iPhone or Pixel.
Love the presentation! Great job!
Last redesign from 2016: https://www.behance.net/gallery/44248007/Uber-Rebrand-Logotype
Something about the type reminds me of Ebay.
I was thinking of Google's Product Sans
Anybody else just see them going the exact same direction as Airbnb? Even using the "designing for everyone" term, the font looks just like Airbnb Cereal, and even some of the designs resemble theirs... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dm_k2HvVsAA9bwn.jpg
Looks nice (bit pretentious for what it is) but a brand is more than just some graphics, and the actual realities of what Uber as a brand stand for are so far removed from this it's comical.
There is one caveat to notice in the Uber rebrand.
They’re calling this:
Rebrand 2018
That is telling.
In 2016, Uber had a “radical rebrand” where ousted founder/ CEO Travis Kalanick spent the previous 2.5 years leading/ meddling with their design team to create all these colors based on country, hexagonal and circular patterns depending on riders and drivers, etc.,
And, one purpose - “shedding Uber’s elitist” image as they battled regulators.
It was a mangled mess of overlapping visual languages.
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-inside-story-behind-ubers-colorful-redesign/
The “2018 Rebrand” - seems more like an outright purge of the ghosts of Travis and is a complete contrast to the previous mangled mess of a brand.
I can see the reason to rebrand, but now we're moving into an era similar to how iOS went completely flat with it's design. It's the removal of any character from the brand and while it's easier to read, it feels dull.
It's so in 3 years time branding agencies can apply whatever elements are in fashion and say "the old logo was lacking in character" etc and make another $400,000. Rinse and repeat.
A big Meh. I feel like the previous rebrand they did with Kalanick actually had some form of meaning to it, with the Uber Bit. This new rebrand doesn't seem to have any real character to it at all.
The design is not earth shattering, unique, or even interesting. It's flat-out uninspiring and could have been achieved with 20 seconds of pressing the down arrow while in the font explorer.
This shit is lazy.
Meaningless waste of money and resources. I guess their design team had nothing else to do? They should have worked on the UX of the app.
Why? Just why? Uber is a young brand, all that it needed was a small logo update, not a totally new style. Logos should be for lifetime. This is just following google sans etc...boring, dull...and Uber is not the first case...a big MEH.
Would have loved to see something less linear - maybe emphasize the curvature of the U, compositionally, to suggest a change of direction without being quite so brutally straightjacketed and blocky. The humanist vibe of the photography and vector illustration clash with the heavy black box minimalism, but i agree with others here that it's a functional palate cleanser.
That animated table of typographic characters is kinda neat.
Awful, reminds me of the shitty eBay logo as an app icon.
Nothing wrong with the last one
Good to see they’ve regressed their ambitions. The last rebrand was only just over 2 years ago. Remember when they were trying to unite ‘bits and atoms’
This is not a rebrand—this is a repositioning with an extension of the current visual language.
Tomayto tomahto
Those capitals are too high...
Re-rebrand.
Why do they need to rebrand almost every year?!
because their reputation is shit and they need to distance themselves from Travis Kalanick, who was very hands on with the last rebrand
I know that, but most users don't even know that he was super involved in the last rebrand. It's something that almost only people from the design and tech world know.
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