Dell, Dell Technologies, and Dell EMCCopied

In September 2016 Dell completed its merger with storage giant EMC, then the largest technology merger ever, creating Dell Technologies, the world's biggest privately controlled technology company.

The naming came first. On 2 May 2016, in a keynote at EMC World in Las Vegas, chairman and CEO Michael Dell announced that once the deal closed the combined family of businesses would be called Dell Technologies. Dell's release set out the architecture: Dell EMC would be the enterprise sub-brand and Dell the client solutions, or PC, sub-brand, with VMware, Pivotal, SecureWorks, Virtustream and RSA alongside. In an email to staff, filed with regulators, Michael Dell wrote that the brand equity in the Dell PC was irreplaceable, that both companies stood for something very special, and that he thought the new name had a nice ring. The merger closed on 7 September 2016.

Brand Union, the strategy and design agency, handled the identity. Creative Bloq reported that the agency was keen to respect Dell's famous canted 'e', one of the most recognisable details in tech branding. The answer was a subtle tweak: the wordmark was slimmed down while keeping the tilted e, and EMC's serif heritage was carried over through the use of the Replica typeface. The aim was to merge two distinct identities without clutter.

Merca20 put the scale of the change in context: it was only the second update in almost 30 years. The original 1984 logo was not touched until 2010, and this was, like that one, a minor retouch, mostly changing the stroke weight and adding air.

The new logos, icons and colour configurations rolled out across products, advertising and digital platforms from September 2016.

For a company of this size, restraint was right. Nobody needed a new symbol for a merger whose story was scale, and the canted e carries decades of recognition. But thinning it out removed some of the old swagger, and borrowing a serif typeface to stand for EMC is a subtlety almost nobody would notice.