Uber Rebrand | Hacker News Reader

Uber Rebrand

uber.design

63 pointsstuartmemo50 comments

I'm a layperson for matters related to design. But, for me, that looks like a lot of thinking and writing... just to land on a mundane font with the company name in white on black.

Perhaps it makes sense though, again, not my wheelhouse.

It's also the style guide.

It helps to ensure that teams e.g. third party agencies from around the world are using the Uber brand consistently.

Same way we have development style guides for when you have large dev teams.

What seems like a very easy thing to do is actually quite difficult. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that "It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."

Reminded me of the pepsi logo redesign document (that talks about 'relativity of space and time', 'galaxy', 'gravitational pull', among other things).

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

Lots of thinking when debugging software also result in seemingly trivial line changes.

Sure. But I'm not sure debugging is the CS counterpart/equivalent to logo and style guide creation.

Why does a company like Uber, which tweaked it's brand only recently, have go through a rebrand all over again? I can imagine it is an extremely expensive endeavor.

I have for long appreciated the business value of design, but often struggle to understand why big companies tweak their brand in small iterations?

The last tweak was in 2016, under a different CEO.

Aha max that's a good data point.

It's a fairly time-honored tactic to redesign a brand that has lots of negative associations built up, and I could see Dara driving this as part of the overhaul. Typically that results in a full name change though.

Having read through this, it sounds like the brand team considered more radical changes but ultimately found that the broad name recognition and generally positive associations with the stark black/white aesthetic were too strong to ditch entirely. What remained was the ability to iterate on the original brand, and that's what you got.

I agree with ditching "the bit" icon in favor of a "U" though. That logo made zero sense, and always felt like a creative team stretching to imbue an abstract mark with some sort of meaning.

Thanks for that perspective, Jeremy. But I think hidden in that question was an underlying question: does changing the brand in non-radical ways change perception in people's minds?

The answer might be yes for Dara, but it seems unintuitive to me.

> does changing the brand in non-radical ways change perception in people's minds?

It definitely does for me. I'm not an Uber user (doesn't exist in Germany), but I know the previous design system. When I looked through this page, I also had the impression that their new CEO has to do with this because it evokes more feminine qualities than the previous corporate design. I cannot exactly pin-point this; I'm just going by the feelings it evokes in me. It somehow feels warmer and more empathetic to me (to the extent that a tech giant can be perceived as warm and empathetic).

It's definitely what Uber needs right now on the design front. Let's see how much it helps them regain trust.

I'd think the negative connotations with their brand have something to do with it. Between drivers committing crimes and stories of engineers being harassed, I sort of feel like Uber ought to be on the corporate sex offenders' registry. They might have found too many people share similar views for their liking.

I like all of this. As a system it's very cohesive and makes a lot of sense. It's fresh and at least aligns with the new image of Uber which afaik is essentially "we are totally not the old uber". I do wish they would have brought back a logo alongside the logomark. The outgoing 'chinese coin' logo was not doing anything for them but it is clear that the U is important and I think they could have done that justice by using it for more than the 'u-frame'

Uber doesn't need a visual refresh, they need a values refresh. People who are choosing not to use Uber now aren't put off by the logo but by their corporate culture. Maybe, maybe if they got that sorted out first, they could come up with a visual identity to support the new and improved Uber that would have some value.

It's been a while, are you sure they are still the same old Uber? Do you work there? Do you know people who work there? At some point a company needs to go through a rebrand to change their image both internally and externally.

Uber's reckless manslaughter happened just a few months ago. Nothing else is necessary to know they still need to change.

Uber is nothing, they should be a 50-100 person company with most in support. But they are not, they are a legion of thousands. And in fact, twitter should have been their match making service and something else should have been their Y.

If the web composed, uber shouldn't be a company, but a mashup. And it shouldn't have a board, it should have a blockchain.

If you think any of that can be carried out, you should try it yourself. 50 people instead of 1000s sounds like huge savings to tout to investors.

It's just ignorance of what it takes to be a global company that has a huge operations presence in many locales.

I work at Uber now, on the Freight vertical. I refused to join under Travis but I took my chances under Dara. The culture is fantastic and Dara has done superb work reshaping it, including a values refresh and significant changes in corporate culture. I've worked at 8 tech companies in my career and Uber has the best culture by far. Long gone are the days of "toe-stepping", replaced by "ideas, not hierarchy". This rebrand is a great external reflection of the internal change. There's still the passion at Uber to change the world for the better, but gone are the days of growth at all costs (and all the chaos that comes with that). Uber is definitely the place to join in Silicon Valley right now, if a "startup feel" is what you want but also a brand that's a verb. We're hiring!

1. One of the goals with their original rebrand to a logo was to make the brand more accessible to people in markets that don't use Latin scripts. Looks like this rebrand abandons that goal. 2. Why do another rebrand just two years after the last one? New team, new leader, new OKR?

Uber has since then abandoned a lot of those markets that don't use Latin scripts.

Is it just me, or is this page incredible bloated and slow to load?

Nope. Made my fan come on and everything. I closed the page before finishing reading.

i got 36.2 mb of resources on a page load without caching

yikes

36.2 MB is pretty much par for the course for design showcases. This is not a news website, and not Craigslist, either.

Isn't that the "Cards Against Humanity" font? https://target.scene7.com/is/image/Target/51078183?wid=1400

I can see the "g" is different, but it's pretty close...

That's just plain Helvetica.

It looked like a medley between Futura / Century Gothic and Helvetica to me.

There's quite a few differences. The terminal of the t and the a are similar, but the perfectly round bowls and O are much more like Futura. Helvetica (basically the font from CAH) also has a slight narrowing on vertical strokes. That g is weird as hell and just looks broken to me. The had to distinguish it from the google font...

The frame design element is nice. Other than that, I find the simple branding style that a lot of companies are adopting to be very bland. I like minimalism, but there is very little to set this new branding apart from the dozens of other companies with very similar branding styles.

Is it just me, or are they slowly gravitating towards Crate & Barrel's aesthetic?

Creating your own typeface seems a bit excessive. Here are the things that I would change based on my first reaction.

- Remove the tail on the Uppercase "U"

- Uppercase "I" and lowercase "l" are identical.

- Rewrite the lowercase "g" as it looks like an "o" with a "j" attached.

- The tail on the lowercase "j" is cut off prematurely.

- The tail on the lowercase "a" should be straight instead of curved out. Will cause problems with tracking.

Would love to see the rest of the ascii chars, as typeface designers often get a bit too crazy with some of the symbols and it really makes or breaks the design.

Liking the new logo, but the rest of it just seems...ok? I really hope they tone down that motion, watching it on the screen made me go "Woah", and not in a good way.

Sure, their website is slow, takes a bit to load the media, and uses up your CPU -- but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't an aesthetically pleasing website. Their website reminds me of a musician's website for some reason. Scrolling through the page tells you a story about the Uber brand. I especially liked the "System Icons" section and how they use a slider to let you transition between light and dark versions of the icons.

Uber's customers wanted the 'U' back. More than better service, low prices, and cab availability. So they gave it to them.

https://twitter.com/coffeeandjunk/status/1040097766331084800

I'm just thinking of all the windshield stickers they're gonna have to hand out...

Wow, I (ready for jaded-HN criticisms...) actually think its terrible. The U and the B are too closely linked, which de-stresses the syllabic bridge, undermining the emphasis on the U, and its unique and cool "long" pronunciation. Makes me want to pronounce it like 'blubber' without the 'bl'.

tl; dr: “We’ve found the color black resonates well with our brand...and our corporate soul.”

That has got to be one of the most poorly designed websites I've ever seen. I'm on a wired desktop and it's barely loading. Why are there like 5-10 physical inch gaps between sections? Why is there a full page picture at the top with no text or anything?

> Why is there a full page picture at the top with no text or anything?

That confused me a little, I thought this was an homonym company related to plants or ecology. It didn't help that the rest of the images never loaded on the first try.

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