The Backblaze Rebrand Reveal | Hacker News Reader

The Backblaze Rebrand Reveal

backblaze.com

I always enjoy the amplification effect of marketing having a stake in rebrands has on how they're talked about. Company I worked at subtly changed colors and minor change to the font (a real font had come out in the interim). We had so much internal comms about it, and happy hours were planned well in advance of launch. Almost none of the engineers noticed the difference at all. But we'll launch major features with less fanfare.

Seems like the best testament to a well-done rebrand is that you don't need a thousand word blog post explaining it.

Yev from Backblaze here -> absolutely, the blog post was mostly intended to dive into the "how" we came to some of our decisions, for those interested and having never gone through one of these before!

It's their version of constantly tinkering with which tools we use or switching up the Vim configuration.

Well.... At least it's slightly less destructive/annoying than when the UI/UX engineers get bored...

The real question is how much was spent between rework, those happy hours, and the branding consultants that made it happen?

The answer would likely make you sick – I'm fairly familiar with one rebranding that changed a serifed blue logotype to a sans-serifed green logotype with a total outlay nearing seven figures.

When you’re spending money on a Pentagram branding, you’re spending money to be noticed by a rarefied New York corporate elite. You invite them to those launch cocktail parties, your consultants are dating people who work for them, the rework tells a story your PR people put into something - a Tweet, a cocktail party conversation, a headline in Apple News - that they read. Michael Beirut goes to a lot of parties, he’s out there being noticed, he’s putting his work into a specific, non-public zeitgeist. It is trickle down and it is real.

A rebranding is more like a corporate version of the event where a couple restates their vows. It does a lot of work even if it is difficult to articulate as ROI positive, and the qualitative benefits are proportional to how extremely rich you are.

It’s probably subtle to you but not to other people, especially people outside your industry. I notice even the smallest pixel offset or the tiniest color change, but I can barely smell a rose, but that’s why I became a designer and programmer instead of becoming a chef. I’m speaking from experience presenting minor color changes to a fellow programmer versus maybe a product owner. I understand this is the same experience my friends feel when they try to show me the smell of a flower and my only response is “well it smells nice like any other flower.”

I am genetically incapable of the same experience.

Just a tangent, but I wonder if your lackluster sense of smell is actually genetic or if it is something that could be developed with effort.

Because there are a lot of foods or smells that are "acquired". So I wonder if you took conscious effort to smell and "savor" (for lack of a better term) different types of flowers, if you would actually start to notice the differences and subtleties.

My sense of smell is just really weak. I can barely even detect the smell. I’ve never smelled a strong flower and I run a home garden.

I’ve done wine tastings and what not as well and I can’t really tell apart anything.

It’s funny because people say I’m a good cook but I bet I overload my dishes with spices more than I need to.

One of the big differences between professional cooks and home cooks is that home cooks tend to under-season things. So maybe your over compensation works out for you.

Isn't this just a redesign, not a rebrand? Or is the word acceptable for something like this?

I've been following Backblaze since the early days, they've done really great.

>is the word acceptable for something like this

Pretty much. You could call it a brand refresh too. "Rebranding" can cover a pretty broad continuum.

To me, a rebrand is anything that changes your "brand" and your brand can be your logo as well as the overall colors and design ethos you use.

You could redesign your entire website and UI and still be on-brand.

But I do agree this is a rather minor rebrand.

I welcome the return to brands using serif fonts.

Nothing against sans serif, but there are only so many times you can see Helvetica or Gotham!

Came here to say the same. It adds character. (No pun intended.) Very nice indeed.

A commenter on that page mentioned one of those things that we've always felt but had a hard time articulating: what is wrong with the Backblaze logo.

...it looks like two sperm fighting over the egg.

Or maybe fish, or a heart, but it doesn't suggest flames to me, I agree. Of course, if 'blaze' is hard to communicate visually, 'back(up)' is even tougher... and to do both at the same time, well, I can see how they got here.

Thanks a lot, never noticed that before, now I can't unsee.

My first thought was, they didn’t change the ugly part??

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze on the backup client.

> it looks like two sperm fighting over the egg

In 2017, this was proposed as one of several possible animations in the Backblaze client showing you are uploading files from your laptop to the cloud: https://i.imgur.com/L16xkMj.gifv It is an animated Gif, if you don't see it moving.

When I saw it, I had to send an EXTREMELY uncomfortable workplace email about a very personal activity two people do with something dribbling out. A few minutes later I hear from across the room "Well I CREATED it and now I can't unsee it!"

The decision was made to avoid that animation in favor of something else.

It could have been made a company theme. Great, now I'm inclined to see how to subtly sexualize everything on the Backblaze site. The _back_end_ is ripe for exploitation!

Cool. When will we get an update on the Facebook data breach?

They gave one. They said, "whoops we got caught, I mean we made a mistake. It won't happen again."

I can't unsee their logo resembling this https://i.imgur.com/5I82vX4.png

lay on back while blaze in the sun

While this seems like a PR piece with little substance except 'here's the feelings for which we chose xxx' I have to say this looks positive. I saw the logo in the article and thought 'that looks shouty', only to read on that that was the old one. And corporate tasteless blue indeed is boring.

Good for backblaze, a company I never used but somehow have positive associations about for whatever branding/fanboys spread the word reason :-)

Yev from Backblaze here -> glad you like it! We hoped the post would be interesting to folks - a lot of times this just "gets done" but we like to talk about some of the decisions and how we got to them which hopefully provide some insight into our brains! :D

Looks like they updated a bunch of their landing pages. Their UI for paying users to browser buckets and computer backups hasn't changed at all. So what?

Rebrands have the tendency to get a lot of unwarranted hate in my opinion, but they should be celebrated. Small details sometimes seem trite or inconsequential, but a brand and logo has so many stakeholders in the way it looks and what it communicates, so any small changes can become a big deal for a lot of people. I think Backblaze have made a nice update, and they should celebrate, because in redefining their brand, they probably have redefined and recommunicated other elements of their business internally.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Thanks! Yea, the conceptualization led to a lot of thinking internally about how we position ourselves and talk about our products as well, so the whole experience was very positive internally!

I’m getting some weird horizontal scrolling and a few layout issues on Safari / iPhone 10 on the homepage.

The logo tweak looks good (it’s gone in the right direction) but it’s about the most minimal “rebrand” I’ve seen for a while! (Nothing wrong with that I guess)

I feel some of the typography on the website could be improved to better compliment the logo though. Some slightly odd font/styling choices there.

The logo looks like competing sperm or tadpoles or something on fire on a red background. Not sure I like it at all. And not the imagery I want from my storage provider. I know blaze is in the name but still.

And a rebrand doesn’t make me forget that Facebook tracking.

Yes. Congress should investigate Backblaze for that. The tech industry needs more regulation for this incompetence in my opinon.

The logo hasn't changed, it's been the same for 14 years.

Oh I guess I never looked at the logo closely when it was red on white background instead of other way around haha.

Yev here -> It's actually changed over the years, but it's always been iterative and incremental changes - but that was one of the things we discussed!

By logo I mean the symbol alone - the shape has remained basically unchanged since the start, right?

Updating branding ahead of IPO? Isn’t that supposed to happen this year?

I think serif type fonts works better for let say professional or financial services.

For tech companies it doesn't seems to rhymes with me.

endorsement warning

A good Digital Asset Management service streamlines rebrands a lot. My old place Brandfolder I think is great for this.

Seems like the pendulum is finally starting to swing away from geometric/grotesque sans-serif fonts for wordmarks.

I hate sans-serif for text, but I kind of prefer it for logos. Logos are supposed to be geometric - it makes them easier to distinguish.

reads to me like an article about how you overpaid and overthought the change of a logo. to something that looks like two sperm fighting over an egg. :)

Logo and hamburger menu icon are blurry on iOS.

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