Yandex (2021)Copied

Yandex is Russia's search engine, but by 2021 it was also a taxi firm, a grocery delivery service, a payments business and a developer of driverless cars. The logo it wore had been made for a much simpler company. On 31 March 2021 the new identity appeared on the Yandex home page, and BBC News Russian and vc.ru both covered the change that day.

The company's design director for Search, Gennady Lokhtin, explained the reasoning. The previous logo was created almost thirteen years earlier, when nobody imagined an internet company would deliver groceries, process payments or build self driving cars. The new identity, he said, reflects what modern Yandex is and works on surfaces from a smartphone screen to a Lavka grocery bag, while reminding people that its services share common technology and a common beginning in search.

The changes come in several parts. The wordmark is more compact and heavier. A new sign, the Cyrillic letter Я in a red circle, joins it and is meant for both interfaces and the physical world, with courier bags and taxi cars named as examples. A new typeface was drawn for service logo lockups. And the search bar dropped the arrow shape that had long been one of the brand's quirks.

The identity was developed by Yandex's own designers with type designer Ilya Ruderman, a long time collaborator who had worked on the Yandex Sans typeface, according to both the company and vc.ru. BBC News Russian added the history: the first identity was created by Artemy Lebedev's studio in 1999, modernised in 2004, and switched to Cyrillic in 2008, when a house typeface was added so the name could be declined properly in Russian.

This is a rebrand driven by sprawl, and it handles that honestly. The Я in a circle is the smart move: a single letter works as an app icon, a sticker on a car door or a patch on a bag in a way that a full wordmark never could, and red keeps continuity with the old mark. Losing the arrow search bar removes a charming but dated piece of web furniture. The bolder wordmark is solid rather than exciting, and the overall look trades some personality for system thinking. For a company that had become an ecosystem, that was the correct trade.