Glassdoor (2023)Copied

Glassdoor, where current and former employees anonymously review companies, had spent about 15 years building a record of ratings, reviews and salaries. In July 2023 Koto unveiled a refreshed verbal and visual identity, timed with a new mobile app and web experience that lets users move between insights, jobs and workplace conversations, Creative Boom and Design Week reported.

Design Week said the brief was to shift Glassdoor from a destination for insights and reviews into a community for real workplace talk, and to reflect its value of radical transparency. The company's concept reportedly began with salaries left and found on a copier. Koto built that story into the work, using real conversations in the verbal tone and sharing designs iteratively in forums such as Slack, Fishbowl and the Glassdoor blog. The tagline became 'Where work talk gets real'.

The previous logo was described as difficult to use in the product. The replacement is an all-caps wordmark flanked by g- and d-shaped quotation marks; the caps nod to elongated door proportions, and the letters swing open when animated. Flipping the first quote mark reveals a lowercase g, and the g/d monogram doubles as the app icon. Custom emojis and icons share the stretched proportions, with deliberately missing pixels standing for openness. Koto kept Glassdoor green, finding an AAA-accessible shade with supporting greens, and added secondary colours inspired by standard office copier paper. Illustrator Josep Puy drew a black-and-white library of job roles and ways of working, on themes of conversation, diversity, anonymity and collaboration.

Creative Boom called it a welcome injection of visual vigour.

Creative Review was frank about what Glassdoor already meant to people: candid reviews and salary data, yes, but also a home for workplace gossip and savage truths, often from disgruntled staff past and present. Against that reputation, it thought quotation marks a fitting symbol, even if the punctuation might look like a mistake at first glance, and saw the thick uppercase wordmark as a clear move away from the corporate design before it. It noted the new Communities feature launched alongside. Leaning into talk rather than pretending the site is a polite HR portal is the honest move.

The quotation marks are the right idea for a brand built on what people say behind closed doors, and the copier palette is a smart nod to its origin myth. The all-caps door reading is a stretch nobody will notice. Still, a logo that finally works inside the app is the real win.