VercelCopied

In April 2020 ZEIT, the company behind the Next.js framework, re-established its brand identity as Vercel. The company's announcement tied the change to a new focus, providing the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing and shipping Jamstack sites, and said more than 300,000 frontend engineers and designers were using its technology. As it expanded its outlook, it felt the new focus merited a new identity.

The visual change was restrained. Vercel introduced a new logotype for use across product and marketing and decided to retain its signature triangle logo, although simplified. The Register, in its LOGOWATCH column, was characteristically dry: the typeface was totally different, it noted, with Vercel leaving behind the plain black Zeit triangle in favour of a plain black Vercel triangle.

The Register also reported that the rebrand arrived with 21 million dollars of venture funding and that the new name combines versatile, accelerate and excel. A Rebrand Field Book handled the practical questions, down to the status account moving from @zeit_status to @vercel_status. Co-founder Guillermo Rauch said the company wanted to support not only Next.js but also other component-based JavaScript frameworks such as Svelte and Vue. The product previously called Now simply became Vercel.

The mockery is fair, and also beside the point. A developer platform does not need an elaborate symbol; it needs a mark that renders crisply in a terminal, a browser tab and a dark mode dashboard. The triangle does that, and keeping it gave existing users continuity through a name change that could otherwise have felt abrupt.

The announcement post carried the business news alongside the name: a $21 million Series A. It recalled that ZEIT started in 2016 to help solo developers deploy apps with a first product called now, and said Next.js powered more than 35,000 sites at companies such as Uber, Nike and Starbucks. The new focus was summed up as develop, preview, ship. A rename timed to a funding round and a sharper three-word promise is textbook, and the clean break suits a company that had outgrown its first product.

The weaker part is the name. Portmanteaus built from business verbs rarely say anything, but Vercel is short, sounds fast and was clearly available. The triangle carries the identity, and it always did.