The "A" and the "K" are fascinating. Almost imperceptibly bent, they round and soften what would otherwise be quite an authoritative logo. The "B" also has a belly. The whole thing is definitely meant to look a little friendly and approachable.
What's interesting to me is why anyone would bother with tweaks like that. The logo looks like a generic san-serif block letter logo, and I only noticed those details after they were explicitly pointed out. Even after looking at it several times, the bent lines register as defects to me rather than as an aesthetic design choice.
Could there be some legal basis to those tweaks, like to make the logo trademarkable?
They probably spend millions in design per year and have to keep their designers team working. At that scale nothing is left to chance, they A/B tested their logos for months &. If it makes them looks .1% better and improve signups by the same amount they're golden.
> I only noticed those details when they were explicitly pointed out.
And that's exactly how it should be, good design is imperceptible, bad design sticks out like a sore thumb.
I have trouble imagining that any sort of measurement tying signups to the logo would have a margin of error smaller than that. I assume this is just a made-up number to signify how much they care about slight changes, but I think the general point that they realistically would have trouble getting any amount of useful signal from slight tweaks like that still stands.
Yes it is, I have no idea what they monitored but I'm sure they didn't chose randomly.
I doubt it; I could instantly spot jagged edges of their design, it looks more like a rush job.
I didn't notice the A being bent outward until it was pointed out either, but i did notice a sense of informality and friendliness in the mark, and that comes from details like the A being bent.
I don't doubt that a typeface as a whole can convey an emotion (through pre-existing associations with the font), but I'm highly skeptical that the tiny tweaks in a novel context on display here can actually do that.
For the record, I didn't pick up on any feelings of "informality or friendliness" when I saw their new logo, and I still don't.
But maybe this stuff is a private design language the graphic designers and typography fans share between themselves (e.g. bent lines == friendly), which they've convinced themselves is generally understood when it's not.
One is going for authoritative, while the other is going for nonsensical.
I agree that it's strange to go for friendly-authoritative with the company logo since most conglomerates typically go for innocuous, but it may make more sense in the other app UIs.