Yahoo News New Slack logo: app ditches the hashtag icon… and fans are freaking out!
Everyone’s favourite work chat platform and email killer, Slack, is saying new year, new me to its millions of users with a logo change.
The company, which was worth $7.1 billion after its latest funding round, has said it wanted to refresh its look, and the logo redesign is part of that.
Slack was always known for its colourful, hashtag-esque logo but the company says it actually caused a lot of pain. It was 11 different colours, and so it didn’t look great on any other background apart from white, and it had to be at the precise 18-degree rotation, or it just didn’t work.
So, the team decided to change it. The in-house design team at Slack worked with well-known design studio Pentagram to create the next iteration.
Now, the logo is only four colours - blue, green, red and yellow - instead of the previous 11. Another major change is that instead of the logo being at an angle, is now straight. As for what the logo is, it’s not a hashtag anymore but it’s not really anything distinct.
Slack said: “It uses a simpler color palette and, we believe, is more refined, but still contains the spirit of the original. It’s an evolution, and one that can scale easily, and work better, in many more places.”
However, as with any change, people are not happy about it, and have gone to their favourite place on the internet, Twitter, to complain.
Add Slack to the list of companies that ruined their awesome brand identity by changing their easily recognizable logo for no apparent reason.
— Sammy (@y0shiy0shi)
Your personal thoughts on the new Slack logo aside, I can’t help but feel the recent slew of tech company logo updates are more a result of bored designers working on barely changing software, than anything else.
— Andy Budd (@andybudd)
I understand Slack’s reasoning for changing their logo, but I do think the IOS icon is not as cool as it once was.
“Background color + centered company logo” just isn’t as slick.— Matt Birchler (@mattbirchler)
A few people are even saying it looks like a swastika, which is quite a strong opinion.
At the end of the day, it’s up to a company to decide when they want to make a change to their design, whether you like it or not. Remember when Instagram changed its logo from the iconic old-school camera design to a new shiny, colourful version and everyone freaked out?
Now, it feels strange to think about Instagram being associated with brown, which is so not an Instagram-friendly colour, and instead the purple/pink effect is how everyone has come to recognise the platform.
All designs change and, at some point, we get used to it.
