EppoCopied

Eppo, the San Francisco A/B testing and experimentation platform, introduced its rebrand on 4 June 2024. Head of design Hang Le explained the reasoning on the company blog: after three years of growth, with headcount doubling in six months and new products in feature flagging, contextual bandits and lifecycle marketing, Eppo's language was no longer expansive enough for its new audiences, and its differentiation took effort to understand.

Le said the team built the brand from what customers believed about Eppo rather than copying a famous brand. Visual inspiration came from Conway's Game of Life and the video game FEZ, and the new logo was meant to nod to the constantly evolving spirit of experimentation and the precisely engineered nature customers described.

It's Nice That's Ellis Tree added the design specifics from the team behind it. The logo is modular and shapes and rearranges itself, becoming more experimental as it scales up, and is based on MMcN Diode, a typeface by Natasha Lucas and MuirMcNeil. The palette uses bold, unusual colour pairings intended to evoke the discomfort of embracing experimentation, and the headline typeface is Sharp Slab. The designers said they deliberately avoided industry norms: dark backgrounds, bright gradients and generic symbols with sans serif wordmarks.

That list of avoided cliches is the best thing about the project, because it is accurate and because the work actually sidesteps it. A logo that recomposes itself is a fitting metaphor for a company that sells controlled change. The risk is the usual one with modular marks: a brand that is always transforming can be hard to recognise at the sizes where most people meet it, in a browser tab or an integrations list. And the colour pairings designed to feel uncomfortable are a bold choice for a product sold to people deciding where to send their data.