Red HatCopied

Red Hat takes its name from the red lacrosse cap of co-founder Marc Ewing; at Carnegie Mellon, students who needed help would look for the guy in the red hat. For nearly two decades the logo was Shadowman, a partially veiled man in a fedora. When Red Hat began a logo update in 2017, the aim was simply to fix a mark that rendered badly on small screens.

Then came the survey. Asked what the logo evoked, people who did not know Red Hat answered sinister, secretive, evil, sneaky. Red Hat's chief marketing officer wrote that the brand team was heartbroken: the shadowy figure contradicted the open, collaborative values of a company that had been the flag bearer for commercial open source.

Red Hat did the work in the open, calling it The Open Brand Project and sharing progress with employees, customers and the community, with Pentagram partner Paula Scher brought in to help the team focus. After five months of research and exploration, the answer was evolutionary: from a guy wearing a red hat to simply a red hat. The company said the hat was what mattered, not who wore it, and that a fedora alone works in tiny spaces like favicons and makes it easier to build a logo system. The wordmark was also corrected: the old logo ran the words together, so a space was added and R and H capitalised. Red Hat replaced its mix of Overpass and Interstate with its own open source families, Red Hat Display and Red Hat Text, built with a type designer.

It was the first logo change in 19 years.

Red Hat's own design notes are candid. The figure under the fedora, first called the Red Hat Man and later Shadowman, had been a playful, defiant comment on the vilification of open source, and once open source went mainstream the image no longer made sense. The old horizontal lockup failed on app icons and T shirts, so the new logo works vertically or horizontally. Even the red was adjusted after the previous shade failed contrast checks on dark backgrounds, and two new open source fonts were commissioned. Retiring a mascot because the fight was won is about the best reason there is.

Red Hat's reasoning is unusually honest: its own people loved Shadowman, everyone else found him creepy. Dropping him trades a character for a symbol, and some charm goes with him. But the hat alone is cleaner, more ownable and finally reads as the name. Doing it in public was a fitting process for an open source company.