Bye Bye Text

Posted: January 5th, 2011 | Author: Sheldon | Filed under: Blog | Tags: branding, logos, Starbucks | 1 Comment »

This morning, Starbucks announced that they will be refreshing their logo. Indeed, a logo redesign for a company with as much presence as Starbucks will garner quite a bit of attention, so I decided I should wipe of the—quite thick at this point—layer of dust on the Blog and throw my opinion into the ring.

While it does look as if they have redrawn the siren, (or mermaid as most sane people would call it) effectively the redesign of the logo was a simple task of removing the outer ring of junk from the previous logo. Surely the driving force behind this decision was to remove the word coffee from the logo. I can just see the boardroom meetings…

We’re not just a coffee company anymore. We sell sandwiches, tea, and muffins! We need to get “coffee” off of the logo!

Fair enough, they have expanded their business quite a bit since 1992 when the last logo was introduced. Necessary though? Not really.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: a brand is not solely a logo. It is my bet that most people would associate a white cup with Starbucks over the logo, not unlike people’s association of Apple’s white earbuds with an iPod. Starbucks doesn’t just have a white cup and a logo backing their brand though, they have their store designs, atmosphere, music, Starbucks Green and omnipresence. All of these factors render this redesign of the logo a metaphorical drop in the coffee pot of what is Starbucks’ brand, and will render what will undoubtedly be a whole lot of complaining about it pretty much pointless.

However, it is interesting to see that Starbucks has the boldness (coffee reference) to pull off the whole “drop the text from the logo” deal. Companies have done it before, Nike, Apple, and more recently—and I think less successfully since they don’t have the visual power to back them up—AT&T. But obviously Starbucks knows that they have much more branding power behind them, something that I’m sure many of the people who will be chattering about the new logo won’t understand.

From a technical and visual standpoint, I do think there is just a little something that is missing from the new logo. To me it seems too uncontained which gives it the feeling of being incomplete. One of the strongest aspects of their old logos was the sound geometric footing, and without having the containing circle it weakens that characteristic, and creates a bit of a weird shape in the whitespace of the siren’s body. Adding a circle around the logo also makes it more versatile, visually ties it with their old logo more effectively, and makes it look more like a “quality seal”. When applied to signs or stickers, the logo as-is will still have this effect since it will be bound in a physical circle anyways, but the graphic circle just adds a final finishing touch.

And as a final footnote, yes, the title is in reference to the song by N*SYNC, something that would never be played in a Starbucks store.