Compaq (2007)Copied

Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq in 2002 and kept it as its mass-market PC brand. In May 2007, at its global mobility summit in Shanghai under the Making Connections theme, HP unveiled a revised Compaq logo. HP's own feature on the event put it simply: a new look and a new logo, coming soon to Compaq Presario notebooks and desktops.

Design Tagebuch's Achim Schaffrinna described the new wordmark as more futuristic, meant to give fresh momentum to HP's coming three-brand strategy. He quoted executive vice president Todd Bradley: Compaq is the brand you need, HP is the brand you want, Voodoo is the brand you crave. Schaffrinna noted that the Q had been modified into a speech bubble and could now work on its own as a symbol, and observed that computer-style fonts seemed to be back in fashion.

Mint covered the Indian relaunch, where Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan unveiled the logo in Mumbai. It described the new mark as a C and Q combined that also resembles a thought bubble, capturing the possibilities technology enables and inspires, and called the identity futuristic yet contemporary. Mint reported that the relaunch aimed to capitalise on Compaq's strong presence in high-growth markets such as India and China, and quoted HP saying over 40 percent of its US retail sales carried the Compaq brand.

Bradley's slogan is the real brief, and it is not flattering. The brand you need is a polite way of saying the cheap one, and the logo dresses that role in borrowed futurism. Turning the Q into a bubble gave Compaq a symbol it never had, which is useful on a laptop lid. But the techno lettering was, by Schaffrinna's own aside, a revival of computer fonts, and a revival is a strange way to look futuristic.