What Happens When a CEO Designs a Brand?

Uber has a whole new brand. Some may say its window dressing for a company that’s come under a hail of negative publicity over the last few years. A day before the launch of the rebrand , NY Uber drivers launched a protest against the company slashing its fares by 15% (the company also lowered its minimum UberX fares to $7, down from $8).

But let’s put aside Uber’s PR woes and look at what they’ve done to their brand. Most rebrands, unfortunately, are ill-advised. Companies feel an urge to stay fresh and contemporary but greatly underestimate the equity they have in their legacy brand (see Gap’s ill-fated logo change, for example). So how did Uber do?

A Bad Trip:

Firstly, the process they undertook raises some red flags; rather than crowd sourcing their millions of users and (especially) drivers for input, Uber took a top-down approach with CEO Travis Kalanick taking personal control of the process. Here’s how Wired, in a major profile, described it, “Here’s the thing, though. Kalanick is not a designer. He’s an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. Yet he refused to entrust the rebranding to anyone else. For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalin Amin and a dozen or so others, hammering out ideas from a stuffy 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.”

Beware the hobbyist. While Kalanick has every right to have a huge stake in a brand that he built from scratch into a $62 billion company, the approach is all wrong: branding isn’t hatched in war rooms; it happens in open, permeable environments that maintain a continuous feedback loop with the market. What’s more, a company with a massive image problem, would win huge kudos for involving its constituents in a rebrand. Every time I undertake a branding process for a client, it becomes a combination of strategy summit, corporate retreat and motivational seminar. It’s the best way to galvanize your stakeholders, to make them feel like they’re co-creating the brand.

The New Confusing Logo:

So, that said, how did the war room do?  Let’s start with the logo. Here’s what design leader Amin saw as the problem with the old logo: “Uber’s branding problems were manifold. For one, the company had two logos—one with a U inside a box on the Android app, and one with a U and no box on the Apple app.” So Uber decides to junk the “U” in favor of something very strange – atoms and bits. Take look, here .

What’s the story behind it? “As they sketched on the wall and sifted through materials, the group began to focus on a blog post Kalanick had written , in which he described Uber’s culture as the combination of bits and atoms. Bits represented the machine efficiency involved in Uber’s mapping and dispatch software. The atoms represented people.”

Think about that for a second. The first red flag is basing your logo on an encyclical written by your CEO rather than a democratic discovery process that would have included customer and driver interviews, social media quants, and especially mood boarding. Then there’s the idea of people rendered as atoms. For a company that’s been pilloried for treating its drivers (and some passengers) poorly, this seems reductionist and tone deaf (some would equate atoms and bits to cogs and machinery).

Even if the atom and bits idea weren’t patronizing, it still needs to work as a piece of design. I have written previously about the 3 different type of logos and their relationship to semiotics: One of the principles of great logo design is a concept called isomorphism, simply meaning that when we see a logo (or any type of image such as a painting or a photo) we look for correspondences with our own reality; we interpret its meaning based upon our experiences and memories. For this reason, the old Uber logo worked beautifully. The logo with its iconic U was a nod to modernism and art deco but more importantly, it evoked driving. The carefully applied reflective gradient and its badge geometry made it look like the hood ornament of a classic car. The new logo, on the other hand, is confusing and cold (it has also been remarked that it looks like the logo for Chase bank). We never make the leap from atoms and bits to Uber because it doesn’t correspond to our experience of mobile ride hail. It’s a recessive, flat piece of art that has no physical scale or the suggestive elements that make a 2d design work (think of how the simple Nike swoosh evokes speed, a hockey stick or even the oars of a boat – perfectly isomorphic). There’s a second logo for the driver (or as Uber calls it, “partner”) app that doesn’t fare much better – a hexagon which looks less like interlocking hands and more like an intimidating padlock.

Word up:

Then there’s the new wordmark. According to Amin, “the letters in the UBER wordmark were too widely spaced, and the U had an unsightly twist on its left prong.’” So they hired a designer from Google who combined a tight, blocky font with a thicker one with rounded corners and straightened the prongs of the “e” in Uber .

Make no mistake, the typeface is terrific—the spacious kerning and round letterforms have a superhero quality which is appealing and energetic. The problem is : so was the old wordmark. This is a lateral move at best. The art deco sparseness of the old typeface recalled some of Chrysler ’s use of typography which immediately made it isomorphic with automobiles. And that left prong which Amin found problematic was wonderful – an outré flourish that gestured at the disruptive brand. Added to that was the beautiful way it lived in negative space, creating a classic, understated sophistication. I never ceased to be impressed with that wordmark when it glowed up on my Iphone.

The Good News:

All this said, there is one aspect of the new brand that works extremely well – the new patchwork quilt backgrounds that are customized to each of Uber’s 65 markets (with an additional 5 global ones). Here’s how Wired described it: “The designers mocked up mood boards for individual cities, regions and countries, piecing together images representing architecture, textiles, fashion, and art, among other things.” What was the difference in this process? They invited input from “driver partners, friends, aunties”. Q.E.D. – when Uber crowd sourced and asked its stakeholders, it produced something memorable and airy and exciting.  The pop-art backgrounds are showcased stunningly in the nifty arrival sequences on the mobile apps. A tap of the screen reveals the new logo which disappears and reappears in a field of pulsing patterns. This is artful and fits with the brand, evoking mobile communications, the heartbeat of a passenger or driver, and the sprawling geography of Uber. This is brand rendered superbly. For Uber, this is where it should have started– with an open brand discovery and brand definition process and then a reverse engineering move back into logo design and typography. Now, that would have been a great trip.