We’ve been quietly rolling out an update to the thoughtbot logo. This year, our design team has been hard at work on a refresh of our core brand, and this is part one of the updates we have planned. Here’s a bit of behind the scenes on what we changed and why.
So, why change the logo?
This year, we’re focused on giving our brand a much-needed update. It’s been years since we’ve reviewed our branding, and we felt like the best place to start was to review what exists today and ask what is or isn’t working. We identified a few areas for improvement and decided to address changes to the core brand elements first, such as the logo and colors. The hope is that this update will give us a solid foundation to build upon as we continue to update our branding.
The main challenge with the logo was that it didn’t work well at small sizes. There was too much complexity in the icon, and it didn’t feel balanced between the icon and text. We didn’t want to change the core essence of the logo and risk losing the brand recognition associated with the robot icon and the specific shade of red we use.
What did we change?
The most noticeable change to the logo is that the icon has been adjusted so that the logo is more legible at small sizes. To increase readability and standardization in the brand, we’ve opted to use just the head of the robot with the “signal” lines above since it is the most distinguishing element in the logo icon.
We also updated the wordmark. We opted for a slightly heavier font weight to increase legibility and even out the overall weight of the logo between the icon and wordmark.
Diving into the details of the wordmark, we adjusted the font to include angled marks on the “t” to more closely relate to the angle of the signal lines in the logo icon. We adjusted the kerning and refined details in the wordmark to tie everything together.
The new logo incorporates our new color palette – more details on that coming soon. There is a separate red color for dark backgrounds versus light backgrounds, and we also added a distinct color treatment for our profile images.
It’s our hope that this refreshed logo will serve us well into the future. We’re also hard at work on more brand updates, and we’ll be sharing more details soon.
