As companies grow up, their branding usually does, too. That often means that the initial quirkiness of a startup logo fades into the slick, streamlined branding you see everywhere today–like that same sans serif font that has become the basis for Google, Airbnb, and Pinterest’s wordmarks.
That winking humor, along with playful illustrations that are meant to demystify what a tech company does, is commonplace among startups these days. “It’s the de facto way to look if you’re a tech company,” says Angie Shih, a strategist at Collins. “The trajectory of every company is that you’re quirky, friendly, approachable, and when you become a massive company with a lot of employees, you become austere, sterile.”
Mailchimp wanted to keep its quirk and eschew the traditional logo trajectory that Shih references, where large tech companies opt for the slick and seamless over the human. But the company did want to rebrand for similar reasons that others do: It has grown significantly since its founding 17 years ago. The company sends about a billion emails per day, and as of 2017, it was adding 14,000 new customers per day.
And among smaller companies that haven’t yet gone corporate, the quirky, playful brand is very in right now–making it harder for Mailchimp to stand out. “Part of the challenge with creating a visual language and a system is, these days, it’s hard to come up with something that nobody has seen before,” Lee says.
Related: Your next Mailchimp message might be on a snail-mail postcard
Most striking are the illustrations on the company’s new website and inside of its web platform. Mailchimp worked with both internal illustrators and artists from around the world to create drawings with a sense of perspective that’s slightly off-kilter–one that makes them appear like they were drawn by either a famed contemporary artist or a kindergartner. There’s a person with five legs representing Mailchimp’s automation features, a misshapen hand balancing a stack of objects illustrating how quickly users can create with Mailchimp, and a giant personified mushroom acting like an umbrella for a host of smaller fungi to represent business growth. On the company’s new website, a human figure with a gigantic arm, who is adding the final piece to almost-completed puzzle, symbolizes Mailchimp’s optimization tools. An illustration accompanying a message to welcome new subscribers shows a group of oddball birds sitting with a person on the pinkie finger of a giant hand. It’s the kind of weirdness you wouldn’t expect from a company with Mailchimp’s success–last year it brought in $525 million in revenue–and that’s exactly the point.
Whether the branding’s strangeness works is another question. Part of the goal was to attract larger businesses, which might be put off by some of the illustrations’ childlike elements. But in staying strange–and, they say, true to themselves–Mailchimp is challenging the typical paradigm for tech branding today.