Graphic Design Can Make You Hate / Love a Brand: PayPal

If there’s one thing that can cause a brand to sink or swim it’s the design of its graphics, more specifically the style of a logo. After all, the logo is what you associate with a company since it’s the first thing you see and you want to give an air of professionalism about the brand from this little symbol.

Getting the graphic design of a company’s logo right is what can make you love or instantly hate a brand. It’s easy enough to create an instantly dislikeable logo, but it’s rather difficult to come up with recognizable and loved ones, like the McDonalds arches, the red hut of Pizza Hut or the fox of Firefox for example.

It’s incredibly difficult to create a logo that people will see whilst they’re out and about and instantly get a warm fuzzy feeling about. It’s all about creating positive emotions with users and making them associate a logo with a good feeling, it’s basically a graphic design version of Pavlov’s Dog.

One company that knows all too well how easy it can be to swing from loved to disliked in terms of a logo is PayPal. They discovered this after the redesign of their company logo in 2014, they had quite a backlash from fans and critics alike.

For those who aren’t familiar, PayPal initially launched in 1998 with a logo that involved two blue ‘P’ logos on top of each other with a space inside each letter as if the ‘P’ in the back was the shadow of the letter in the foreground. It was an interesting approach to design that grabbed your attention, was instantly recognisable and, above all, was popular with users.

Then in 2014 they made a lot of fuss about how they were completely redesigning their logo and overhauling their brand. Although they only filled in the blank space of the ‘P’, it was what they thought was a unique look.

Although, in reality, their colored ‘P’ is something that almost 90% of people that have a PayPal receipt have done whilst on the phone to their Customer Support.

So you may wonder, what caused them to throw away a proverbial golden egg of a logo, well it came as part of the companies ‘new identity’.

Although they’re still providing users with the same reliable payment systems, which are perfect for casino players as you can top up your account quickly online or make instant payments through mobile using their handy PayPal app. Their ‘new identity’ is basically their attempt at making their brand flexible for a wider range of screens from higher definition TV’s to wearable tech. It seemed to be their attempt at looking more modern for the market.

Even though there was a backlash to this redesign, PayPal is still as popular now as it was when it launched. But whether they have any more logo changes planned for the future is something we will just have to watch out for.

Graphic Design Can Make You Hate / Love a Brand: PayPal