WebexCopied

On 8 June 2021 Cisco held a hybrid work event to relaunch Webex, and a new logo came with it. No Jitter noted that Webex had been the foundation of Cisco's collaboration business since its acquisition in 2007 and had gone through several iterations, but had never had a major overhaul until now.

The new mark may look like a stylised W, No Jitter wrote, but it is a rotating double helix, the shape of a DNA strand, and also a metaphor for two hands together, teams in flow with each member contributing equally. Its smooth, rounded curves reflect the belief that collaboration should be simple and familiar for everyone. Cisco's own blog said the logo was inspired by inclusion, its guiding design principle, and introduced the name Webex by Cisco.

The context was blunt. Diginomica pointed out that Webex first hosted online meetings in 1996 but had fallen behind competitors, most notably Zoom, which was itself founded by former Webex engineers. The rebrand came with a television campaign featuring McLaren F1 and with features aimed at permanently hybrid work, from real-time translation to gesture recognition and noise removal.

No Jitter tied the logo to Cisco's broader shift from changing the way we work, live, learn and play to powering an inclusive future for all.

No Jitter supplied the numbers behind the timing. Cisco's research found that before the pandemic only 8 percent of meetings had at least one remote participant, a share it expected to reach 98 percent afterwards. The rebrand also tracked a change in Cisco's own mission, from changing the way we work, live, learn and play to powering an inclusive future for all, which the product backed with features such as gesture based hand raising and noise removal. A logo built on inclusion is only as convincing as the features underneath it, and here at least the features came first.

The mark is pleasant, colourful and very much of its year, all gradients and soft curves. It finally gives Webex an identity of its own, which matters if it wants to be chosen by users rather than assigned by IT. But a friendlier W cannot by itself win back the people who learned to say zoom as a verb, and the double helix story is more elaborate than anyone joining a call will notice.