I like Uber’s new look

Uber, the ride-hailing company, last Tuesday rolled out totally new branding, and, as with everything Uber, it was controversial. The first voices, as usual, were the haters. “Bizarre,” said Fortune of the app icon (above). “So ugly,” said one tweet, “I've had to move it off my home page.” “A square sperm entering an egg,” said another, her mind obviously on other things.

I like it.

I should preface this by saying that I’m seeing Uber for the first time, really. I had paid no attention to the old look, so for me the new Uber is Uber. And I realize that a change is different from a first impression. But still. It’s being called “shit, arrogant, infuriatingly untidy.”

My eyes are rolling. The look, especially taken as a whole, is pretty, colorful, and inviting. It’s neutral enough to be malleable, and it’s scalable, all of which are fine qualities for a global enterprise and not easy to achieve. The old look was none of these things.

What caught my interest was the news that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was hands-on with the makeover. You read horror stories about things like this — a micromanaging, non-design executive frustrating the professional team with his personal tastes and uneducated assumptions. “Why should this take more than a week? My kid could draw it in five minutes” — goes the nightmare.

But according to Wired magazine, that was not the case here: “For the past three years, he’s [Kalanick’s] worked alongside Uber design director Shalin Amin and a dozen or so others, hammering out ideas from a stuffy space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. ‘I didn’t know any of this stuff,’ says Kalanick. ‘I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.’ ”

That’s the key right there. He knew it was important. With that understanding, plus his obvious perseverance (three years!) and a willingness to learn (what non-designer studies kerning? Many designers don’t do that.), the odds of a favorable outcome were high. Props to Amin, though. Whether it was because of Kalanick’s input or despite it, he and his team came up with a thorough and very appealing result.

Design is difficult in any case, but no more so than when it’s a total rebrand of a young enterprise operating in so many different places and cultures while still defining itself. You want a nice, fill-in-the-blanks creative brief? Won’t happen here. It took the team 18 months to find the five words they needed — grounded, populist, inspiring, highly evolved, and elevated — just to anchor the effort, and even longer to find the bits-and-atoms theme that brought it all into focus. 

Bits and atoms — Kalanick’s creation — strike me as somewhat precious and irrelevant, at least to the public, and of course it’s being criticized. But that’s not its value, which instead is in what it did for the group. When the canvas is blank, it’s so easy to get lost in the labyrinth of possibilities that you can lose your way before ever finding it. We’ve all experienced this. But with the bits-and-atoms idea in place — bits representing technology and atoms representing people — other dots began to connect. Designer Catherine Ray saw bits in the square tiles in her bathroom, which led to her drawing dozens of other patterns — circles, triangles, waves — from which emerged Uber’s new, multicultural themes.

The intent is ultimately to have a unique pattern-and-color palette for every region and city in which Uber operates, connected by a common thread of the square “bit” and of course the new logotype, which is bolder, tighter, and stronger than the fussy, skinny old one.

The site and mobile typeface is FF Clan (below), a fresh, modern, crystal-clear, and very popular sans-serif designed by ?ukasz Dziedzik:

And as I said, I like all of this. It’s welcoming and clear, easy to understand and use. Will the public care about the design details or the three years it took to work them out? Of course not; not any more than you care about what’s under the hood of your car, as long as it’s running smoothly. Caring — and getting it right — is our job, and done well, the public will simply lean into it, like it, use it, trust it. That’s huge, and not often achieved, especially so invisibly. Once the online hatefest blows over (about, probably, tomorrow), my sense is that the rebrand will do very well for Uber. 

Regardless of what you think of it, or what you think of Uber as an enterprise, let me close with a word about negative criticism, which change seems to attract.

Negativity, no matter what form it takes — snark, hate, sarcasm, whatever — means to negate, or bring to nothing. It is the antithesis of creativity and particularly surprising among designers, who need their clients to believe the opposite of them. It requires nothing of the critic — no vision, to skill, no toil — the obvious corollary being that nothing happens. Does he want to make things better, or is he content to poison the air? And how now, having done so, does he expect the rest of us to trust his creative judgment, not to mention his work ethic?

Design is about building, making, creating. Ours is a positive, life-affirming profession. It can be difficult, sometimes extremely difficult, which is why most people do other things instead. Negativity tempts all of us, especially if one has been hurt. The urge (sometimes the screaming urge) is to offload the pain to others, the problem of course being that now others must bear it for us. So it’s not an answer. I’m not talking to trolls, the lonely sociopaths who will twist you just because and not care. I’m talking to the rest of us who want good but are tired and frustrated and sometimes reach for the down button because it’s closer. If nothing else, just walk away. You’re worth more than that, and you have better things to do. The world is a big and amazing place, and it needs you to be here with all of your creative goodness. I’ll do my best to be here with mine.

For further reading about Uber’s rebranding:
Uber’s Brand Guide
Your Identity is Arriving Now, by Armin Vitt at BrandNew
The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding, by Jessi Hempel at Wired