BlaBlaCarCopied

BlaBlaCar was founded in Paris in 2006 to connect drivers and passengers travelling between cities, and by 2018 had more than 60 million users. Founder Frédéric Mazzella said the early branding was functional, built to teach people what carpooling was, with playful colours for a diverse community. Ten years on, he wanted it to capture what using the service was really about: bringing people closer to each other and to the places they love.

The rebrand arrived with a product change. Chief executive Nicolas Brusson announced a new search and matching engine, inspired by the commuter app BlaBlaLines, that automatically finds intermediate towns along a driver's route, so people far from big cities could join rides at any point. His line: wherever there's a road, there will be a BlaBlaCar. TechCrunch noted the company wanted to stand apart from buses and trains, and preferred to sell conversation and meeting people rather than low prices.

London agency Koto developed the logo. It trades the primary colours for a more mature palette, and the two Bs of BlaBlaCar come together like two people in a car, with the shapes also reading as speech marks framing a conversation, or, as TechCrunch put it, two upside-down speech bubbles. Koto founder James Greenfield said human connection was the fulcrum of the whole brand. Imagery shifted to people, with two people hugging at the front of the website and app store pages.

The new colours and logo went live everywhere on launch, 30 January 2018.

It is a smart idea neatly executed: one mark that is a monogram, a car seat and a conversation. The muted palette lost some of the old warmth, and 'more mature' is not a virtue for a service built on strangers chatting. But the overlap carries the brand far better than the old cheerful wordmark did.