Lenovo (2015)Copied

Lenovo unveiled its new identity at its Tech World event in Beijing in late May 2015. The timing was symbolic: it marked ten years since Lenovo bought IBM's PC business, and the company, which by then also owned Motorola, called it the culmination of a decade-long transformation.

The logo is a lowercase lenovo wordmark with a slanted e, set inside a rectangle. The box is the point. Its background can change to different colours, materials, images or video, so the logo can carry campaign content rather than sit on top of it. Lenovo said the new mark offered a more personal, engaging and consumer-centric experience.

Chief marketing officer David Roman said Lenovo wanted to be seen as a company spanning categories, with an attitude of never stand still and a focus on the internet, so it needed a logo that conveyed that. Nick Reynolds, CMO for Asia Pacific, told Design Week it was built to be digital-first and social-first: not a traditional, static logo, but dynamic, bold and disruptive. The press disagreed on the agency, with Business Insider and Design Week naming different firms.

Design commentators were unconvinced. Brand New called it bland, and commenters there sighed at yet another rotated e, said the letter looked cut from an o, and compared the red version to BuzzFeed.

Business Insider explained the box. The wordmark sits inside a container whose background can be swapped for colours, materials, images or video, and chief marketing officer David Roman said the point was to show a company spanning categories with a never stand still attitude, focused on the internet. Lenovo's release promised something more personal and consumer centric. Not everyone was sure about the letters: one reaction the outlet published regretted losing the sharp e, which visibly looked cut from an o. A flexible frame is a sound idea; the type inside it is the weak link.

The critics were right about the type and wrong about the system. The rotated e is a familiar trick, but the box is a genuinely useful idea for a brand that sells across dozens of categories and lives on screens. The problem is that a container that can be anything says little on its own.