XiaomiCopied

Xiaomi revealed its new logo on 30 March 2021 at the launch of the Mi Mix Fold, the same event at which it announced its move into electric cars. It was the company's first major branding change in over a decade, and founder Lei Jun said the search for designers had begun in 2017.

The change is a corner radius. The orange square around the MI letters became a superellipse, a shape between square and circle. Xiaomi said the designer tested the formula across many values and settled on n=3 as the ideal balance; Vice reported at least 24 candidate shapes. The MI letters were redrawn to fit the softer frame, and black and silver joined orange as supporting colours for premium products. The logo was also meant to sit wherever it best suits the content, rather than fixed in a corner.

The designer is Kenya Hara, president of the Nippon Design Center and art director of Muji, whom Xiaomi presented at the launch and The Verge, Vice and Caixin all credited. Hara framed it around one word, Alive: the logo, he said, was not a simple redesign of the shape but an encapsulation of Xiaomi's inner spirit.

Lei Jun pre-empted the obvious, asking the audience whether they were disappointed that Xiaomi had simply made its logo rounder. Many were. Caixin and The China Project reported that the work was rumoured to have cost 2 million yuan, about $300,000, and Weibo users joked that Lei had been scammed and offered to make it rounder still for 50 cents. Some defended it, and others pointed out that the controversy itself was great publicity.

Caixin Global collected the online verdict. One commenter asked whether the designer had simply cropped a screenshot from a Samsung phone; another joked that three years of work must have been done on the last day after much procrastination; a third deadpanned that nobody understood how hard and expensive it was to polish four corners into curves. Cynics called it a way to keep Xiaomi in the conversation, and a few defended its simplicity and the folly of mocking a long process after the fact. The backlash was louder than the change, which may have been the most effective part of the launch.

The mockery was fair about the presentation and unfair about the work. A brand as widely known as Xiaomi's orange square should not change much, and the rounder frame does match the rounded hardware it sits on. What did not fit was a 20-minute philosophy lecture for a change most people could not see.