Red Hat’s chief marketing officer discovered their logo was rendering poorly in digital formats (especially on small devices like smartphones). But then they discovered even bigger problems in surveys (including with potential customers) about what feelings the logo evoked:
Sinister. Secretive. Evil. Sneaky. These respondents might not have known anything about Red Hat, but they did believe that man lurking in the shadows didn’t immediately inspire their trust. In their survey responses, they wondered who he was and what he was doing in the logo…. Our iconic logo — including the partially veiled, fedora-wearing “Shadowman,” as we Red Hatters affectionately call him — wasn’t squaring with the values we firmly believed the logo stands for…
When we decided to undertake an evolution of the Red Hat logo — the first in nearly 20 years — we set two guiding principles for ourselves. First, we’d do the work the Red Hat way, in the open. And second, we’d take this opportunity not just to improve our logo, but to make a bold statement about the ways Red Hat has evolved over its 26-year history… In December 2017, I announced our plans to update our look with a global invitation to collaborate. And since then, Red Hat’s Brand team has been collecting feedback from customers and partners, coordinating work with well-known design consultancy Pentagram, poring over survey data, and iterating, iterating, iterating on the new design — which we’re now ready to unveil….
The new logo reflects Red Hat’s evolution — from a scrappy upstart “sneaking” into data centers with boxed copies of a Linux-based operating system (not to mention mugs and t-shirts) to the world’s leading provider of open source solutions for enterprise hybrid cloud environments, someone working daily with the largest companies and agencies in the world to develop and run mission-critical solutions. We’ve truly stepped out of the shadows.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot