Design mistakes 101: What happened to Paypal’s logo?

In an industry where design is a key differentiator as well as the all-encompassing key to online legitimacy, you’d think companies, and big companies at that, would get re-designs/re-branding right, yes? Well, not exactly!

It’s not exactly today’s news, but I felt compelled to at least discuss this. Internet giant, PayPal, son of another Internet giant, eBay, recently decided to re-do their logo and homepage – and boy, were they wrong!

So what do you do when you are a billion-dollar corporation with more money lying around than you know what to do with? Re-brand, of course.

To kick things off, let’s see how the lovely folks at PayPal decided to (in my opinion, of course) ‘kill’ their logo.

Okay; So I have to admit – the original logo wasn’t highly intricate nor advanced for that matter – but it was certainly one thing; Iconic and memorable – both important characteristics of a logotype! The minus-offset-tracking and kerning as well as bold, yet gentle stroke around the letters coupled with sharp-accentuated cornering really made the whole package come together.

So what do we have now? Well, let’s break it down visually:

How to make the new Paypal logo in 3 easy steps!

1. Type ‘PayPal’ in black-coloured Verdana, bold-italic, size 54.1px font and smooth anti-aliasing.

2. Turn faux-bold setting on, set the base-line shift and change tracking settings as below.

3. Colour in ‘Pay’ and ‘Pal’ in the hex codes specified below (or if you really want to get technical [and web-safe]; #003366 and #336699, respectively).

And there ya have it.. We’re done..

There have been some changes made recently to the front page of PayPal that apparently show a more-rounded lettering style logo. That shouldn’t be a problem. Add a stroke to the logo (of the same colour for ‘pay’ and ‘pal’ and make sure round cap/join is on (pen tool), add a “trademark” symbol and we’re done once more.

This should now be your masterpiece; The new PayPal logo.

Sure, looks ‘Web 2.0′, but not everything needs a face-lift and Paypal could have certainly given the previous, white-encrusted logo a little face-lift without changing it drastically.

I mean, here’s one case – What happens to a web designer who has (the very popular, mind you) background colour of #003366 or #336699 on their website? The visitors will either see “Pay” or “Pal”, depending on whether the webmaster has used any of those colours as their background.

So it’s not a huge deal, but with the stroke, it didn’t matter what background the logo was placed on – it would still work. Did designers think of that first?

Anyway, just something to think about I guess. I don’t really mind the logo; especially with its rounded-edges – I just don’t think it’s very much ‘innovation’ over something that wasn’t really as broken as they obviously thought over at eBay headquarters.

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