A Logo is a visual representation of a company or a product.
In many ways, a logo needs to portray a journey, a vision or a goal, and this is why a logo may require a redesign from time to time. The same goes to Slack. The cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services is having its logo redesigned.
And here, things can either be good or bad for the company.
First of all, Slack's previous logo was unique, quirky and somehow nerdy. The tilted hash-like logo was seen as a great representation for a Slack that stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge".
Second, the redesigned logo that took cues from the old one, is tweaked to be somehow less playful.
But Slack has reasons for that:
"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 degree rotation), or with the colors tweaked wrong, it looked terrible."
To compensate this, Slack developed several versions of the logo, which were meant for different purposes.
However, having different logo for different purposes would make the logo less distinguishable. Too many variations would mean that the logo won't be able to represent Slack in a good way.
"They were all pretty good … but not at all cohesive. And the important thing about being a brand is that whenever people see you in the wild, they should recognize that it’s you.
"The new logo should fix that inconsistency."
For this particular reason, it's a tough choice for Slack which was valued as a $8 billion company with 8 million daily users.
Slack's in-house design and brand team worked with Michael Bierut and the team from Pentagram, to create a new and more cohesive visual identity.
The redesigned logo uses a simpler color palette to mitigate the old logo's weaknesses.
Slack believes that the logo "is more refined, but still contains the spirit of the original. It’s an evolution, and one that can scale easily, and work better, in many more places."
"The story we’re trying to associate with it is it feels like pieces coming together to form a whole," he continued. "You get a sense of e pluribus unum a little bit in a way I’d argue you don’t get from two parallel lines crossing two other parallel lines."
The logo here has distinct pieces, in which together in a pinwheel, they become multifunctional tools for the brand. The droplet shape for example, can depict a chat bubble or GPS coordinate.
Slack’s pinwheel can be a representation of Slack's future, a lot more than its octothorpe design could do.
However, the logo receives mixed reviews.
Slack's reasoning behind the logo is to maintain visual consistency. While there is no doubt that people would experience that much trouble in identifying Slack's redesigned logo, but the new logo here is somehow a bit messy. The pharmacy-like logo design somehow drives Slack's iconic part of the software away from its originality.
Some people commented the logo as "an uroboros human/duck centipede", similar to "four penises" and similar to "a whimsical swastika". But some praised it by saying, among others, that the logo looks like "a multicolor squirt emoji."
