Ebay's new logo

http://pages.ebay.com/announcements/new/index.html

by hodgesmr • 14 years ago

69 53 14 years ago

pages.ebay.com

lrm• 14 years ago

Simple, but I like it. I wonder when we'll see a new Yahoo logo.

raphinou• 14 years ago

There was a post not so long ago on HN about prices of logos. I wonder how much they paid for this one (I hope not too much because I feel I could have done it: select a font, write ebay, color letters with colors of old logo).

arrrg• 14 years ago

Logos never stand on their own. Making them work in context is the hard part (but we can, for obvious reasons, see very little of that on the linked page).

All I will dare to say that if they plan to just change the logo this doesn’t look like a good idea. The ebay website looks very old-fashioned – and the old logo fits right in there. If they want to change their logo they have to do more than change gifs on their website. Maybe that’s planned, I don’t know.

If they want to change, their new logo (and the linked page, too) indicates that they want to change to a minimalist, simple design with few elements and lots of whitespace. I’m honestly not sure whether that fits the brand or makes for a very good ebay experience.

ebay – to me at least – has always been about cheap prices and selling stuff you no longer need to other people. Like a flea market, only more useful. (Hm, but maybe they want to change that perception of ebay?) Do I want it to look super serious and professional? I’m not sure. I’m personally a fan of that aesthetic, but I’m not sure whether it works for ebay.

To me there is nothing wrong with updating the look of ebay, to me it just seems like you have to do so carefully.

But that’s all premature speculation now. We do not currently know how the new logo will be used and that’s the important part.

Ntrails• 14 years ago

At a rough estimate: too much.

quarterto• 14 years ago

Mmm, Univers. I like it.

cschmidt2• 14 years ago

It seems like Univers Extended, which is why it seems too wide to me.

http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/singles/linotype/univers_std_5...

It reminds me of the horrible stretched type of the Bing logo.

uptown• 14 years ago

I had the exact same opinion. Also, the position of the inner-circle of the "b" and the "a" look awkward.

bertomartin• 14 years ago

Google influenced?

bradddd• 14 years ago

with a dash of Microsoft's new logo. They're all moving toward a plain, simpler design.

nwatson• 14 years ago

I think more Microsoft-influenced. The move to the clean typography of "Metro"/"Modern" Windows 8 interface is propagating elsewhere.

crisnoble• 14 years ago

I think it's the colors that bring this thought to mind, I had the same thought. To be fair they already had those colors before: http://www.littlegreenrobot.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11...

saurabh• 14 years ago

Google

bcks2• 14 years ago

They burnished out all the character. It completely lacks the quirk, play, and scrappiness of the old logo and projects a much more "neutral" and generic space. Which I suppose is a valid intention reflecting a strategic shift -- it's just a bit dull and bland for my taste.

sharkweek• 14 years ago

the funny thing is -- and I'm making an assumption about ebay here based on previous experience I've had in logos and redesign -- is that this was probably the effort of hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of deliberation, re-designs, focus groups and meetings; but the end result looks like it could have been derived in about an hour of work

bcks2• 14 years ago

Yeah, it totally reflects such a process. Maybe the suits wanted something sleek and "frictionless marketplace" or something, but it also just screams process: clearly the lowest common denominator, the least offensive to the largest number of people.

aaronharnly• 14 years ago

According to a Mashable article, eBay has had a few previous logo iterations you may not be familiar with:

1. The original "AuctionWeb" black bar: http://5.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/aw.gif

2. eBay black bar: http://4.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ebay.gif

3. eBay blue: http://5.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Original-eBay...

4. The kooky eBay we've come to know: http://logos.wikia.com/wiki/EBay

Article: http://mashable.com/2010/08/07/ebay-facts/

squarecat2• 14 years ago

Quote from the article:

"…one that didn’t last more than, well, probably a week if my memory serves me. And thank heavens for that! Can you imagine what eBay might have become with such a boring old logo? Still, it could have happened…(shudder)." - Jim Griffith, the first customer sales representative at eBay and the current host of eBayRadio, regarding the #3 logo (above)

Seems to apply this time around, as well.

Robin_Message• 14 years ago

Hang on, is it called ebay or eBay? The logo is ebay but the press release seems to be firmly eBay.

Then I checked their website and realised their current logo is ebaY, so maybe they don't mind about capitalisation.

dexter313• 14 years ago

Wiki and Google say it is eBay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow...

ghostfish• 14 years ago

The zero–space kerning badly bothers me. With traditional stylized logos I think there's more artistic license, but when your logo is just a font, I feel it should be more readable.

phmagic• 14 years ago

Agreed. Or have some meaningful overlap. To me, whenever a company switches to a different logo after years of stagnant progress, it signals a last effort to artificially strengthen the brand.

mbell• 14 years ago

Interesting site design Somewhat distracting and confusing but its the first time I've seen something that uses a piece-wise parallax type movement(the ebay underneath the content bars).

D3nver• 14 years ago

It really bothers me how the e and the b overlap more than the other letters overlap.

51Cards• 14 years ago

Overlap? They are touching but I see no overlap?

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Seems like an optical illusion or display related. I thought the same at first. Feels very sloppy that way.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Quite simple reaction, 'huh'. It's not an ugly logo, nor a beautiful one, it's incredibly plain and doesn't really sell me on it. So, huh.

andrewljohnson• 14 years ago

Never in the history of the internet has a new logo been posted to a forum and elicited a positive response. I think it's a fundamental law of the internet.

harryf• 14 years ago

This one makes me wonder if Google is about to buy ebay

bduerst• 14 years ago

Well, they have the same color scheme for their logo

possibilistic• 14 years ago

Now that would be truly exciting! I'd love to see a battle between Google/Ebay and Amazon take shape.

ericdykstra• 14 years ago

It's inoffensive, but it doesn't retain any of the personality of the iteration we know. I'm not a big fan, but for a company like ebay where their logo doesn't really appear in a lot of different places, it's fine.

If Apple or Microsoft released a logo with this little of personality, it would be a mistake.

jrblast• 14 years ago

It's an improvement over the old logo though. The old one looks really messy to me. It might not be so bad without the transparency though.

DannyBee• 14 years ago

This changes everything! I have a sudden urge to sell all my stuff on ebay!

mbrd• 14 years ago

It looks like the mockups, particularly the tablet one, were made in MS Paint.

edit: Also, is the "tm" really necessary? Surely they can defend any future trademark infringement disputes successfully without it? Perhaps I'm being naive about the world of intellectual property rights.

klrr• 14 years ago

Looks great, but why does they make it such a big deal? Marketing purposes?

talhof8• 14 years ago

They could have done better than that (though I do think this one is better than the previous logo)

raldi• 14 years ago

Except in the favicon.

timjahn2• 14 years ago

"Seventeen years ago this month...."

Wait, WHAT? Ebay is 17 years old??? Wow.

TylerE• 14 years ago

17 years old is 1995 ;)

To make us really feel old - the kids getting their driver's licenses today were not alive when the Lion King came out on video, much less was in theaters.

timjahn2• 14 years ago

Holy crap.

We are indeed getting old, heh.

B-Con• 14 years ago

How dare you put the last two decades in perspective like that... :-S

mladenkovacevic• 14 years ago

The font is very retail-ish .. Macy's logo comes to mind. And the Google/Microsoft primary colours associate it with that tech giant domain. So I guess it kinda works from that point of view but it's just a little boring for my liking.

rglover• 14 years ago

These folks do not like kerning. Glad they kept the colors.

jaysonelliot• 14 years ago

I was one of the UX designers for eBay in 1997-98, just before the IPO. I was working on what would become the Gallery view.

When Meg Whitman took over, I presented the work we had done so far. I was pretty wet behind the ears at the time, and I was enamored with the latest shiny objects on the Web. eBay, by way of contrast, had a look that could be charitably described as "homespun." I was busy polishing things up, tightening the color palette, improving typography (as much as one could in 1998), reducing clutter, and using what I thought of as killer JavaScript flourishes to really blow people away with the Gallery View. I may have even tried to introduce some Flash at the time, I'm not sure.

What I do remember was the way Meg schooled me when I came in to present my slick new state-of-the-art Gallery. I don't remember her exact words, but she told me that I was building something that simply wasn't eBay. She explained to me that the success of eBay came from the sellers who thought of eBay not as a company, but as their own corner of the Web that belonged to them. The audience for eBay, she explained, was mom and pop types, people who were comfortable with garage sales and flea markets, and who had built a level of trust with eBay based on what they saw as a brand that shared their down-home values. eBay's biggest competitor at the time was Yahoo! Auctions, and eBay was killing them, because people thought of Yahoo! as a faceless, monolithic corporation, and couldn't feel a sense of ownership about placing their auctions there. I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of being appropriate to your audience, and not always going for the latest, slickest design.

I've always liked the fact that their logo kept that original homespun feel. The site has slowly evolved over the years, and their audience surely has as well. It's arguable whether eBay still has the folksy appeal it had in the 1990s. The new logo represents a very authentic reflection of the change to the brand, and the company itself. The nostalgic side of me would love to see the old logo and the old brand stick around forever, but if I'm being honest, this is probably the most appropriate thing they could have done. It's a genuine expression of the brand's history and personality. You can't say much better for a logo than that.

growt• 14 years ago

Thank you for this story. I always wondered why ebay looks the way it does. And I always assumed it was because of greed (the reasoning being something like: "If we can charge for bold text, we will not matter how it looks"). This puts ebay's design, or the lack of design, in a much better light.

someproduct• 14 years ago

This is a wonderful example of interface as brand. Logos are such a small piece of online brands, and it's cool to hear that folks at eBay grasped this so early. Thanks a ton for sharing!

rvid• 14 years ago

Why photoshop the logo into images? (like in the gallery). I think that's a horrible thing to do for the brand.

squarecat2• 14 years ago

eBay's and Microsoft's new logos communicate nothing about the company/brand.

I appreciate clean, minimalist design, but logos that antiseptic are like marketing that says nothing about the product or service (which admittedly works on rare occasion...)

virtualritz• 14 years ago

conradfr• 14 years ago

I was working at PayPal when they changed the logo and thought that it was indeed more modern, definitely not bad ... but ... slightly not right.

I still think of it that way today and feel the same thing of that new eBay logo.

And it drives me crazy that I can't really pinpoint what and why :)

autophil• 14 years ago

One look at it and I thought: whoopity-doo-dah-day

Nothing to see here.

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

That is certainly...some text.

cschmidt2• 14 years ago

The best site used by graphic designers for discussing corporate identity change is Under Consideration Brand New. They have their eBay article up....

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/ebay_set...

    Of all the potential logos that could be done for eBay 
    this is the absolute most boring and risk-averse logo 
    that could have been both presented and selected.

Ebay's new logo

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