Dailymotion (2015)Copied

Dailymotion, the video streaming site, had an identity built around a small 'tower' icon that, its designers said, no longer represented it and was hard to use. In April 2014, after a pitch, it appointed London agency venturethree to bring clarity and more confidence to the brand.

Designer Jason Lowings told Design Week the new identity was an evolution of where Dailymotion had been, but with more presence. The logo was simplified, the logotype and a new 'd' icon were designed to hero the name and stand out, and the colours got brighter. Venturethree also recreated the brand typography and drew a suite of icons. A key constraint was coexistence: the identity had to sit alongside a wide range of partners and content creators on the platform without crowding them.

The rebrand launched in March 2015 together with a redesigned player, fully customisable and responsive, intended to align the viewing experience with the new brand. Transform judged the new logo simple and far more modern than its predecessor.

The redesign reached beyond the logo. Telecompaper, citing 01net, reported that Dailymotion made several major visual changes across its website and its Android and iOS apps, adopting a simple blue d as the new logo and launching a beta of an HTML5 player that the company said had been redesigned and re-engineered from scratch for every screen. Design Week noted that a redesigned music player launched alongside the identity, fully customisable and responsive, to align the experience with the new brand. Creative Bloq later listed the change among the biggest logo designs of 2015, describing a platform with 300 million viewers on its player and 30 billion video views a month. The timing was eventful: weeks later Orange, which had owned Dailymotion outright since 2013, entered exclusive talks to sell an 80 percent stake to Vivendi for 217 million euros, a deal completed on 30 June 2015.

It was a sensible clean-up rather than a statement. The 'd' icon solved a practical problem for an app-era platform and the wordmark was clearer. But a tidier logo cannot by itself explain why viewers should choose Dailymotion over its far bigger rivals.