Logitech (2015)Copied

In July 2015 Logitech unveiled what it called the biggest brand transformation in its history. Wired framed it simply: the company did not just make mice anymore. Under chief executive Bracken Darrell, who arrived in 2012, Logitech had cut investment in mice by two thirds and moved money into speakers, tablet keyboards and teleconferencing, categories Wired said generated $380 million in sales over two years.

Darrell told Wired he was stunned by the lack of a design ethos when he arrived from Braun. He hired Alastair Curtis from Nokia to build a design team, and then hired DesignStudio for the identity, a year-long collaboration according to designboom. New product categories would carry a shorter name, Logi, while mice kept Logitech. Darrell's reasoning: in five or ten years, calling yourself something-tech would seem awfully 1980s.

The old mark, teal with what Wired called something that may or may not have been a boomerang, was dropped. The new logotype is built from simple geometric shapes. Designboom reported it uses Brown Pro, a typeface by a designer from Lausanne, the city where Logitech was born, and draws on Paul Renner's experimental sketches for Futura. The detached curve of the g hangs like a grin, and the colour shifts with the product. Darrell admitted some staff thought the company owned teal; teal, he said, now looked very old.

A Baltimore type designer told Wired the old logo looked like something carved on the side of the Flintstones' house, praised the mirrored l and i and the paired circles, and wished the flourish on the g had been left off.

Wired framed the move around Bracken Darrell's argument that in five or ten years calling yourself something tech would seem awfully 1980s, with technology in clothes, shoes and tyres. Since 2012 he had shifted money from mice into speakers and tablet accessories, and the rebrand was the culmination. He arrived from Braun, where he had met Dieter Rams, and was stunned to find Logitech had great engineering but no designers. A type designer Wired consulted said the old teal mark looked like something carved on the side of the Flintstones' house. Few rebrands have a clearer case for change.

He was right on both counts. The mark is warm, legible and genuinely modern, and the colour system finally gave Logitech a personality. That little spur on the g is the one fussy note in an otherwise confident piece of reinvention.