Uber (2016)Copied

In February 2016 Uber's users opened their phones to find the black-and-white U icon gone. Wired framed the redesign as very much the work of one man: CEO Travis Kalanick, who spent three years in a cramped space the team called the War Room with design director Shalin Amin and around a dozen others, studying everything from kerning to colour.

The concept was bits and atoms: technology and the physical world of people, cars and cities. Design director Shalin Amin worked alongside Kalanick, and Uber's newsroom post presented the local colour and pattern sets as a celebration of the cities it served. Amin told The Economic Times the team had validated the system with country teams and was not afraid of change.

The new app icons put a small, bit-like square inside a coloured geometric shape, a hexagon for the driver app and a circle for riders. Black, grey and blue gave way to bright colours and lots of them. Each of 65 launch countries got a toolbox of assets with its own colours and patterns, red in China, turquoise in India, dark teal in the United States, alongside five global palettes, plus mid-century modern illustration and photography rules.

Critics were unconvinced. Fortune called the new logo a mistake and said it looked like JPMorgan's, and Campaign's review found the concept too abstract to carry.

Most CEOs, Wired noted, hand this kind of job to a branding agency or an in-house team. Uber did it in-house, but with the chief executive at the drawing board, and The Verge's headline captured the result as an exercise in self-discovery.

The launch was a coordinated media event, and the reaction was swift. PR Week noted that Wired, The Verge, Fast Company and Mashable all ran first-look stories on the same afternoon, while Travis Kalanick, who had personally helped design the mark, explained it in a blog post as celebrating the company's technology and the cities it served. Twitter's verdict was close to unanimous against: users said they could not see a U for Uber anywhere, compared the icon to a smoke detector, Pac-Man and a bank logo, and wished the company had left the most recognisable U on the planet alone.

That is the problem. The local palettes were a genuinely interesting idea for a global service, but the icon meant nothing to riders who had to hunt for it on their home screens. Uber's own return to a plain wordmark two years later says enough.