The 20 biggest logos of 2017

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Whether or not you work in logo design, whenever a big brand refreshes its identity it’s worth checking out. 

New logos are released with such regularity it sometimes can be difficult to keep track of them. So to help you out, we’ve compiled the biggest logo designs of 2017. Together, they make an interesting snapshot of the last 12 months in design.

Note that the word here is ‘biggest’. We’re not saying that these were the ‘best’ of 2017; simply that they garnered the most attention, for whatever reason...

01. Tinder

This August, popular dating app Tinder took a radically approach to its visual identity. To accompany the launch of a cleaner new look and interface design, it discarded its sans-serif wordmark and replaced it with a simple icon; essentially a wider and rounder version of the flaming dot on the previous logo’s ‘i’.

The new symbol, which has been given a nice colour gradient to add warmth, was created by DesignStudio in collaboration with Tinder’s in-house design team. You can learn more about the new branding here. 

02. Juventus

It’s not that surprising when an app abstracts its logo down into a simple symbol. But it’s far less 

common (yet) for a sports team to do so. So it took the design community by surprise this January when Italian soccer superstars Juventus released this new design, taking a huge leap forward from its previous, fussier shield emblem.

Surprisingly minimalist, the new logo, created in-house, shocked many by abandoning the shield element altogether, although does manage to incorporate the traditional black-and-white stripes of the team’s strip as a nod towards continuity. You can learn more about the new branding, which won two D&AD awards, here. 

03. Dropbox

In October, file storage service Dropbox caused a big stir by announcing “the biggest change to [our] look in our 10-year history.” This colourful new visual identity was designed by American studio Collins in collaboration with Dropbox’s in-house team, Instrument, XXIX, Sharp Type and Animade. Its radical use of clashing colours attracted a lot of criticism, and the less dramatic changes to the logo itself flew under many people’s radars. 

Despite the relatively minor nature of the logo update, though, it still alters the design from the previous version in some meaningful ways. More obviously, the icon has been transformed from a recognisable three-dimensional box into what the designers call “a collection of surfaces”. 

This follows the general trend in logo design to simplify icons over time, but while the new shape is more minimal and geometric, many questioned whether it was still recognisable as a box. 

Less controversially, the wordmark has also been updated, with a new cleaner look based on  Sharp Grotesk, and shift in colour to black to more easily separate the two elements of the design. You can learn more about new Dropbox branding here.

04. YouTube

In August, YouTube launched a brand new logo , its first redesign since 2005. The name of the brand was no longer boxed by a red screen; that element has now been given a brighter, more vivid colour. It’s #FF0000, which the in-house designers told The Verge was “a really pure red that goes to the RGB of video”. The screen device now contains a play button, placing the brand’s central ‘call to action’ at the heart of the new branding.

The logo’s lettering has also been changed, with the team discarding the previous font, Alternate Gothic Number Two, and designing their own, which was inspired by styles from classic TV and the VHS era, as well as “the essence of print”. You can learn more about the new branding here. 

05. Huffpost

Founded in 2005 by Arianna Huffington, the liberal news blog Huffington Post has gone from strength to strength. So it was about time that it got a proper wordmark, rather than the variety of newspaper-style titles it had been using. 

In April, the newly named HuffPost released this logo, which was created by New York agency Work-Order. It’s typeset in the Klim Foundry font National, and set in bold italic because, according to a press release, “they point us forward”, as well as being “reminiscent of the slashes in URLs”. 

You can see more of the new branding for HuffPost here, and read about how designers reacted here. 

06. Pinterest

In August, another web titan released a new logo that pushed things forward without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Without as much as a blog post, Pinterest sneaked out this new logo , which swaps the script lettering of the previous design for a new, more formal wordmark cast in Neue Haas Grotesk.

While there was no official explanation of the new identity, some have speculated that the website, which is popular for lovers of craft, scrapbooking and interior design, is trying to attract a broader audience, particularly amongst men. Others have suggested that the quite different fonts of the new wordmark and the (unchanged) icon work poorly together, presenting a brand that’s unsure of its identity. 

You can read the full brand guidelines for the new logo here. 

07. Converse

One of the biggest design trends of 2016 was the revival of old brand identities by the likes of NatWest, Kodak and Co-op. And there was a bit of that in this year’s new logo for Converse .

“The star chevron has been in use since the '70s and we wanted to make it a major part of our identity,” Adam Cohn, VP global brand design told Cool Hunting. “So the idea was: ‘Let’s leverage an icon that’s part of our heritage that’s also representative of moving forward. The challenge was getting our name in the mix so we had to develop a new wordmark.’” 

That wordmark, based on heavyweight sans-serif fonts, was created by combining of four or five different past versions of the logo, harking back to lettering from the 1920s and 30s.

The reaction from the design community was  mixed, though. Opinion was divided on the unusual angling of the star, and there wasn’t exactly a chorus of praise for the new wordmark either, with its apparent inconsistencies and questionable kerning. 

It’s important to note, though, that this new logo was designed (in-house) to represent the Converse company; the well-known Converse All Star/Chuck Taylor brand logo is not affected by the redesign and remains intact.

09. Mozilla

Mozilla is the global non-profit organisation behind the Firefox browser, and it harnessed the spirit of open source when it came to its new logo, released this January. 

Beginning in June 2016, Mozilla worked with London-based agency johnson banks to develop the new identity. But rather than doing so behind closed doors, it let the design community follow along each step of the way, on this blog.

Most notably, the new logo incorporates the colon and forward slashes of a URL to reinforce the idea that the company is at the heart of today’s internet. 

While the previous design used FF Meta, for the new wordmark Mozilla collaborated with Dutch type foundry Typotheque to create a custom slab serif font, Zilla (which is free and open to all to use, by the way). 

Clean and clear, Zilla was intended to evoke Courier, which was used as the original font for coding back in the day.

You can learn more about the thinking behind the new Mozilla logo in this blog post.

02. Calvin Klein 

Underwear brand Calvin Klein aimed to go back to the future with its latest new logo, which was released this February. 

Swapping the lowercase letters of the previous design for all-caps, the new design was announced by the company as: “A return to the spirit of the original; an acknowledgement of the founder and foundations of the fashion house.”

The new logo was created by Calvin Klein’s in-house creative team, led by chief creative officer Raf Simons, in collaboration with famed British art director and graphic designer Peter Saville. 

03. Aldi

With a 50-year history behind it, German supermarket chain Aldi is today represented in nine countries with more than 5,600 branches and around 124,200 employees. In March, it released a new version of its logo, designed by German consultancy Illion Markensocietaet. 

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The new design gives the stripes of the old logo more flow, coherence and three-dimensionality. There’s also been a colour change, a refinement of the border and a new curved typeface. 

In contrast to current trends, then, the new logo represents a move away from the aesthetics of flat design, rather than towards them.

You can read what designers had to say about the new Aldi logo here.

04. South by Southwest 2017

Held annually in Texas since 1987, South by Southwest, aka SXSW, remains one of the world’s coolest music, film and interactive festivals, and has helped turn the city of Austin into a major hub for tech and design.

While the logo changes every year, this year’s logo from Foxtrot was something of a departure from the usual colourful, cartoony lettering of previous logos, such as the 2016 design. 

Monochromatic and utilitarian, this new sans-serif wordmark was designed to be much more flexible within an overall identity system. It could also be said to reflect the relative importance the digital side of the festival has assumed in recent years.

You can see more of Foxtrot’s branding for SXSW 2017 here.

05. Euro 2020

The Euro 2020 logo was released in April

In April, the organisers of European’s biggest soccer tournament released this new logo, created by Y&R Branding Portugal. 

Normally, logos for the Euro championships showcase the host nation in some way: the 2016 logo for example, represented France’s art tradition. 

But in 2020, the competition will be played across all corners of Europe for the first time, in 13 host cities. The new logo celebrates this by using the metaphor of a bridge, bringing together fans and players across Europe, represented as happy, colourful, waving figures. 

07. Action for Children

Action for Children is one of the UK’s largest children’s organisations, running centres, fostering and adoption services. This new logo by johnson banks, released in April, takes a quite radical approach by setting the name of the organisation within a statement: ”How Action for Children Works”. 

This concept stemmed from an idea originally expressed by the client – that they should ‘demonstrate the difference’ they make to children’s lives.

“Rather than simply hiding behind a ‘new logo in the corner’, this forces the organisation to always show how they work, and the difference they have made,” explain the johnson banks team in this blog post. 

It also helped provide a clear direction when johnson banks created a series of powerful posters for the charity. “From almost the first layouts, we were able to talk about and illustrate the vast breadth of what they do – something that they struggled to do before.”

08. Paraguay

The new logo for Paraguay was released in April

If you’re a developing country that wants inward investment, you need to project an image of economic dynamism and high growth. If you’re a developing country that wants to promote tourism, you want to emphasise the vast, unspoilt natural beauty within your borders. 

With its first-ever country branding campaign, Paraguay has set out to combine the two, based on the idea of an “economically fertile” country. 

The logo was developed by Uma Studio for Bloom Consulting (strategy) and Kausa (advertising). They explain that the symbol represents three elements: a flower, representing growth; the sun, representing wealth; and a gear, representing the opportunities offered by Paraguay.

You can see more of the new branding here.

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