HP's Premium Logo is Brilliant

HP's new Spectre 13 might just launch a major offensive against Apple. It is thin and  sexy enough to compete with the 13 inch Macbook.

But what is really interesting about the new Spectre 13 is really the new logo it shows off which is a series of 4 slashes that are at an angle which look unmistakably like the HP logo you have been used to seeing.

The new HP logo we are told was sitting quietly in the HP archives for the last few years since 2011.  Haven't we always kept our best work hiding in cupboards and hard disks hoping to be recovered later at a more appropriate time when our progressive work would collide with more progressive times?  But we are lucky this one actually came back to life.  

According to Moving Brands the company hired to redesign its logo, the simpler lines are intended to evoke HP's continued progress and upward momentum, with the 13-degree angle being a recurrent theme in all of the accompanying brochures, web assets, and even hardware design.

So the Spectre 13 has the New HP logo at a 13 degree angle?  Now that sounds like mathematics has a fairly close relationship with branding and identity.

The new logo is different and thought provoking particularly because I think its the first time that a brand is using a different more progressive version of its logo on its premium range (do write in if you have other examples). So far brands have used totally different brand names for its premium range for fear of contaminating it with the values of their more popular or mass brand.  

Toyota and Lexus the most famous example immediately comes to mind.  Or other brands have  been using a new sub-brand for their premium range. Like Honda has the Accura.  And even Marriott’s association with the Ritz Carlton brand (as its parent company, even though they are not linked in an identity system) could lead people to think less of Ritz Carlton compared to the (luxury only) Four Seasons brand.  Probably the first category to experiment successfully with premium variants were the credit cards.  

When Amex however changed their credit card to gold to show off their premium variant they couldn't prevent other cards from doing the same or even better with the platinum variant.

So what HP is doing in terms of design and branding seems quite breakthrough.

Supposed to take on the 13 inch Macbook, the HP Spectre 13's only shortcoming maybe that it is running Windows.( apologies I am a Mac fanboy ).  But on good looks, design, lightness it is supposed to come quite close.  

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