MasterCard (2016)Copied

By 2016 Mastercard was positioning itself as a technology company as much as a card issuer. CMO Raja Rajamannar told Adweek the aim was to modernise the brand and optimise it for the web, with the new look rolling out alongside the Masterpass digital payments system.

Pentagram kept the one thing everybody knows, the interlocking red and yellow circles, and made them the focus. The name moved out of the circles and below them, set in lowercase, and the overlap gained a clean orange blend. Lowercasing the c in mastercard was explained as a signal that the brand was no longer just a card. Getting the three colours right reportedly took hundreds of tests so they would glow on any background.

The design came from Pentagram, with Michael Bierut and Luke Hayman credited. The system extends into circles and arcs as a graphic language, and the lowercase setting carries into product names.

Wired asked the obvious question in its headline: if everyone already recognises Mastercard, why change it? Its answer came from Mastercard itself. In internal tests more than 80 percent of people identified the circles alone as the brand, and design lead Cindy Chastain said the mark needed to thrive in a digital space, from billboards to smartwatches. Bierut described the job as getting out of the way rather than leaving fingerprints. The team mined the archive too: the overlapping colours of 1968 and 1979, and the detached wordmark of a 2006 corporate logo that never appeared on cards. The 1979 lettering, built from portions of circles, steered the choice of typeface. Not everyone was sold. Wolff Olins chief design officer Chris Moody told Wired a logo still has to stand out, and wondered whether the stripped-back mark would.

Adweek stressed that the familiarity was deliberate. The redesign, the first in two decades, was timed to roll out in the autumn alongside Masterpass, the company's secure digital payment system. Chief marketing officer Raja Rajamannar told the magazine the impetus was to modernise the brand and optimise it for the web, and the work went beyond the mark itself to an entire design system built on circles and arches.

It is one of the clearest examples of an evolution done properly: almost nothing was invented, yet the mark became far more useful. Pulling the symbol free of the name also proved how much work the circles could do on their own.