Design has its rules, but some of the most exciting projects are ones that subvert expectations by abandoning rules completely—or at least the ones we’re familiar with. Over the years, graphic designers have cleverly reimagined iconic business logos and transformed them into fresh visuals, while still retaining the brand’s identifiers like the logo’s color palette, or typography. Though it’s a new year (and a new decade!), which will almost certainly inspire new frontiers in design and architectural aesthetics, one thing will remain the same: the fun and frivolous phenomenon of remixed logos. Dribbble, the platform for digital designers, recently collected entries from some of its creators who gave famous corporate logos a refresh just for kicks.
https://twitter.com/anatomyoflogos/status/1190374799534673920
It’s only right to start with Twitter, as it has become the virtual Oval Office in the past few years. Designer Myles Stockdale‘s take on the platform’s omnipresent blue bird mascot is more geometric and bold than Twitter’s current offering, and features the addition of a small, circular eye. Stockdale also deepened the blue of the website’s brand identity (perhaps to get closer to Pantone’s “Classic Blue” color of the year selection?) and added sharper edges to the typeface. Given the chaos that laces the Twitter timeline on a daily basis, this harsher, more direct visual language seems fitting.
Apple, a company whose very success was built on brilliant branding, seems like it needs no interference. The design of the brand’s iconic, partially bitten apple, which stamps every Mac computer, was first designed by Rob Janoff in 1977 as a two-dimensional, rainbow-striped fruit next to the company name. It went through several iterations in the following decades, and now exists as a flat, black silhouette. However, designer Ruslan Babkin decided to take the logo back to its roots by rendering it in technicolor. But he also looks toward the future with his treatment of the apple’s shape, which has rounder edges and an outline with greater movement, making the logo look like a colorful, speedy blur. His choice to incorporate color in the form of a gradient rather than sharply delineated lines makes the logo feel more modern, to be sure; but there’s something clean and sophisticated about the grayscale of Apple’s brand identity today that gets lost.
Another company whose logo relies on the eye-catching excitement of color is Google. Its logo, a conservative, uppercase ‘G,’ is synonymous with the search engine. Divided into sections of red, yellow, green, and blue, the logo is not particularly inspiring. So Indonesia-based logo designer Azzact‘s decision to convert it into a funky lowercase ‘g’ with the exact same colorblocking, is a welcome revision.
Legendary logos from other companies, from FedEx to Spotify to Burger King, also got updates. To check out the rest of these reimagined logos, visit Dribbble here.
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