New logo (opens in new tab)

Marketing veteran here. Just like Uber and Instagram, they messed up big. They took something iconic and replaced it with something forgettable. The first sentece after they show it tells the lie:

"Firstly, it’s not change for the sake of change."

Unfortunately, due to the nature of company politics, this kind of thing usually happens because a new CMO or other exec comes in and needs to "mark their territory". Marketing in tech right now is having a big problem with people rising to the leadership ranks that really don't understand the basic fundamentals of the craft.

This feels so generic. I get the problem they're referencing with too many colors and not working in all contexts. But the human mind being what it is, I never had a problem connecting "rainbow-colored #" with "Slack". This...this is just some kind of blob. I couldn't tell this apart from a big pharma company, or some kind of conglomerate that makes everything from toasters to jet planes. I'm reminded of the Philip Morris rebrand to Altria, even as far as a generic colorful squarish logo. It's gone from "# means Slack" to "I guess that's Slack...?"

More interesting for the HN crowd I think is the article from the actual design company that did the redesign: https://www.pentagram.com/work/slack

I think it's supposed to look like little message bubbles, but I get kind of a "squirt emoji" vibe from it.

Edit: apparently HN doesn't support emojis. https://emojipedia.org/splashing-sweat-symbol/

[warning: cannot be unseen]

There is a swastika hiding in the negative space in the middle of the logo.

I just refreshed my desktop app and I have to say I am not crazy about the new default avatars. It is entirely possible I just got accustomed to my team's collection of colors and shapes, but the current ones have much less variety resulting in them all blending together. I wonder if this is a partially intentional dark pattern to get us to move away from the default avatars.

Every company must have a logo with four colors -- some variant of red-green-blue-yellow. It should also fit into a square, and the colors must stay separate, splitting the square into 4 parts if possible.

I liked the old logo since it represented one of the most iconic features of the Slack, that is channels. This new one seems really generic and I can't associate it with any of the killer features in Slack.

Nonetheless, least props to Slack team to putting reasons on why the logo needed to change, instead of a generic "we wanted to go to new horizons with our product" or "the old logo was getting behind the new design trends" or something else.

I miss the octothorpe (#) -- it was a clever reminder of Slack's origins in IRC, where channel names start with the same symbol.

(Technically, in IRC, they could be prefixed with an ampersand (&) as well, but nobody ever did that. Great for making super-secret channels, though.)

Maybe if it was for a company named Splat . . .

> We’ll not bore you with the design thinking

With a logo like that, you had better at least link to it. Oh, you did. But the link's label was just "Pentagram," so I thought it was to the company's home page, not its specific story about this work.

I understand their complaint about the complexity of color, though I disagree. I thought it was beautiful, maybe worth the complexity.

Regardless, they seem not to know that the new logo is more complex, and therefore harder to be distinctive. They have traded complexity of color for complexity of shape. If you concentrate on the logo in outline, you can see that it has so many lines going so many different ways, all tightly packed, that the overall impression is a drop of rain after hitting the pavement.

It's hard to make good logos. For people whose only job is to make logos, it might in fact be harder. They're tempted to overthink it. They go through 40 revisions. The first two or three are often the best. This was the case here too, based on Pentagram's development artifacts. After a while your secret reasons behind each jot and hook overwhelm your judgment.

Maybe the best thing is to take a month off after you think you've got it, to get a fresh pair of eyes. All those fancy reasons you came up with to justify it fade away. Like, what are those raindrops around it? Oh, you say they're supposed to be speech bubbles. Well, they kind of look like speech bubbles now that you mention it. But not really, because speech bubbles are shaped differently when they contain actual speech. These look like drops. Scattered around the logo like that, it looks like what happens when you drop something.

PSA: If the new sidebar is a little too aggressively purple for you (it was for me), the "Aubergine classic" sidebar is the old style

After working with Pentagram in the past, I can't say I'm all that impressed. Most times they tend to completely lose the concept they were trying to go after, and this is no exception to the rule. The beauty of the original hash logo was that it harkened back to the tags and IRC channel names. You can't see the hash in the new logo, and frankly, it looks like a blasted swastika.

Logo aside,

I appreciate the quick blog post much better than the old Uber brand which tried a bit too hard to explain every thought behind each part of the rebrand.

https://www.uber.design/case-studies/rebrand

My colleague’s first comment: they should have invested that into developing a dark mode.

A pity that Slack’s still lacking such a seemingly easy to implement feature.

However, I like the new logo!

Why do companies insist on rebranding every few years? Is it just to keep the in house design team busy? The old logo was memorable and has established Slack as a recognisable brand. Why change it when there is no shift in direction of the company or product?

It looks like a google product now. If I could stop seeing you the swastika, it'd be better.

The # at least was related to the channels and showed some relation to chat programs because of IRC channels.

I'm sure they had their reason for this change, I'm just not sure if it was a good reason.

Look, I get that the four outer dots are probably supposed to look like speech bubbles.

But they look like squirts. Emoji squirts. Which are associated with sexting. And squirting is kind of associated with sex in a lot of people's minds...

I'm trying to keep an open mind. But the logo is four squirts around four lines of roughly phallic proportions and rounded ends.

Seriously. This was literally the first thing I saw when I saw the logo. And judging from some of the other comments here, I'm clearly not the only one.

Really suprised this got approved.

Congratulations Slack!

To me, it seems a bit useless though, but I don’t have any relevant knowledge about Marketing nor Corporate Design to provide useful feedback. There’s probably some value in a re-brand even though the company is not facing any criticism for their colors, logo, and slogan.

> It was also extremely easy to get wrong. It was 11 different colors—and if placed on any color other than white, or at the wrong angle (instead of the precisely prescribed 18° rotation), or with the colors tweaked wrong, it looked terrible.

I stand corrected, these are good reasons to justify the rebrand.

That being said, I felt a bit scared this morning when I opened Slack and found that the colors were slightly different to what they used to be, I freaked and thought someone had hacked my corporate account, then I went looking for answers and found this post, my heart was immediately at peace.

I hope this change brings them more opportunities to grow.

---

EDIT: Interestingly, their “Release Notes” says version 3.3.6 [1] but 3.3.3 [2] in the download page.

The :slack: emoji is also showing the old logo. I wonder if they are going to change “slackbot” avatar as well.

[1] https://slack.com/release-notes/osx

[2] https://slack.com/downloads/osx

Shouldn't these multi-million-dollar design firms have a checklist that includes:

* [ ] Doesn't look like 4 sets of you-know-what arranged in a circle

* [ ] Whitespace between elements doesn't look like swastika

Someone mentioned these, and now I can't unsee them. Way to go, Slack.

I really like their last logo. It was recognizable.

If they really just wanted to change it, they could have just simplified the colors. Oh well, now they just look like every other generic company (it reminds me of bank logo but I can't remember which one).

Just reloaded my work slack. For a good couple of moments I thought my clumsy fingers accidentally changed the the color balance on windows.

Since Slack changed default profile icons too, I recreated mine in CSS: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/VqNXXP

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. If you have to argue whether it’s an improvement, it’s not an improvement.

People complaining about performance since ever?

Solution:

Let's spend loads of money on a new logo!

* We Don’t Sell Saddles Here – Stewart Butterfield – Medium || https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c5952...

> The answer to “Why?” is “because why the fuck else would you even want to be alive but to do things as well as you can?”. Now: let’s do this.

They hired someone really fucking good at making ugly lower-case As.

It's four penises.

It really does look like a swastika.

Feels like preparation for going public.

What about the features that existed in the last favicon ?

We used to be able to see if there was new messages, or if someone tagged you, directly in the favicon without opening slack, now it is impossible.

You are forced to go check slack all the time to see if there is something new. I'm disappointed :'(

This seems like it tracks with the rumours/suspicions that they are planning to go public soon. It's likely that the impetus for their stated desire to to clean up and consolidate their branding, could be that aforementioned upcoming IPO.

Am I the only one who is kind of irrationally annoyed that they push an update of the app for a mere logo? They even mention in their update notes that nothing else about the app has changed. I know it's a raindrop in the ocean compared to all the HD movies being streamed, but 7 MiB times the total number of installations for what is probably less than 50KiB if properly optimized feels wasteful (7 MiB being the Android version, I don't know if this is the same on all mobile phones. Also, I'm probably being overly optimistic about that graphic being optimized)

It really looks like a 99 Designs special.

This new logo is a departure from their old art style that was everywhere in their old project, the game Glitch. (Interesting that it was exactly 11 different colors, like the 11 Giants in Glitch).

The new logo makes them look like a boring, stuffy company that caters to enterprise clients. Of course they chose this branding, but maybe this is also what they deserve?

Microsoft is red-green-blue-yellow

Google is red-green-blue-yellow

Now Slack is red-green-blue-yellow

Who is next?

Love it! Surprised by the negative reactions. The original logo feels a bit cheap and not well thought while this one has more purpose.

I think it stinks and prefer the old one.

Before, Slack was associated with such a universal, recognizable symbol: #.

The symbol was and is a part of their product as well.

Now it’s just a multicolored blob.

I feel like this would be equivalent to Starbucks dropping the mermaid.

Then again I’m not a professional logo designer who gets paid hundreds of thousands dollars per “project”, so what do I know.

too complicated. The mind goes to the left and stays there. Not that "slack" is not read but still

Is anybody else reminded of the old Hasbro electronic Simon game? Same 4 colors, same basic orientation.

I must be the only one but it resembles CNBC...

http://wcontest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/1529781727_;w...

So, with that out of the way I wonder if they will be able to implement a "dark" theme now. I asked a couple of weeks ago if they had some new themes on their roadmap and they had a vague reply about putting it on the list. :fingers_crossed:

I like it, looks very "Googly" though.

I hope they release new desktop and mobile apps soon

Reminds me of logo of The Swedish International Development Cooperation: https://www.sida.se/English/

I saw the favicon change and I thought a plugin was messing with the page.

Ignoring the actual shape/design - they went from 11 colors to 4 (+1 if you consider the text itself). This isn't much of an improvement because printing any swag/tshirts will require a full 4up press (or four spots, depending on how they choose inks) - which is still quite expensive.

The old ChallengePost logo used 4+ colors, which meant every shirt we printed came at a $2-5 premium over a single color.

When we rebranded to Devpost, we came up with a 2 color design (so we could do spot colors), which was an improvement - but I still wish we had gotten down to 1 color.

The old logo looked like an extension of 23AndMe's logo and the new logo looks like a Google product logo with four ducks in a circle.

I like the old logo better.

The new logo makes it seem that Slack is a waterpark, rather than a tool for messaging and collaboration.

Looking at the new logo again, I also think of sprinkles.

Changing the logo doesn't help our team. I wish they'd used that money to get group calls working on iOS, speed up app on MacOS etc.

With f.lux the new default purple looks horrible.

I just liked the old logo based out of hash tag - naturally so close to messages. In fact, the logo was the brand for Slack.

The logo is whatever, what I don't like about it is that the desktop app is now the blueish color vs the old black.

The logo works, but that purple background in the app... it will take some getting used to for sure.

It's always a little sad to me when technology companies make sure a big deal about logos, marketing, and brand. Im not sure if I disrespect them more but Id rather such focus be on the technology aspect of what they do vs the look at the font we made, or the logo marketing put together.

Looks like a derivative of this. I feel like I've seen a company using this logo but am spacing out.

https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-arrows-logo-designs-...

It looks a lot like the Google Photos logo turned upside down to me.

> Firstly, it’s not change for the sake of change.

Are you sure about that chief?

I wonder how long it took them to go through this redesign.

The "TL;DR" at the bottom should be at the top!

Looks good imo. Not much else to say about it. Good job!

Is it just me or does it resemble a swastika?

I like the new icon, but prefer the old font.

Why would they chose a swastika for a logo?

Using that pre-IPO money I see

Meh (I tried to come up with a more insightful critique, but let's be honest...)

I thought TL;DRs were supposed to be at the top of a post.

They did all this but still no dark mode.

>Firstly, it’s not change for the sake of change.

Actually yes, it is.

Sucks. Don’t like it.

Like, why am I seeing this on hacker news.