LOGO BRAND REVIEW
Evernote is a mobile app, developed in 2008, that is developed for organizing notes, tasks, lists, and etc. It is also useful for syncing messages and giving the users accessibility to view them anywhere. According to Brand New, a brand identity blog and a division of Under Construction, Evernote has over 225 million users, 8 billion notes, and 25 different languages represented.
In August of this year, celebrating their 10-yr anniversary, the company released a redesigned brand identity. The new look was created by DesignStudio, and their goal was to develop a “fresh, energetic, and modern visual system to bring the positioning to life.” The elephant, also known as Mads, is the significant look of Evernote. The exploration process contained a variety of changes of the icon – ranging from extreme and drastic to subtle and minimal. The elephant explorations show that maybe the company did not want that big of a change. As long as there was an ear with a crease in it, a trunk, and an eye, Evernote was set.
As a designer, there are plenty of times where I have explored many ideas and majority of them have made me uncomfortable once I went back to narrow down which ones were stronger than the other. What is crazy is that majority of my revisions or ideas are the ones that were created in
the very first sketch or have a slight alteration with a letter or design. That’s it! I hate it, but we have to go through the bad in order to get to the good – even if that means sketching 50 different layout design revisions and end up picking the one that had the least bit of change. Evernote did just that.
The logo consists of a green elephant instead of the gray, when elephants are actually that color. The redesign seems more personal and trustworthy with the serif-typeface. The curvature shape in the trunk making a spiral gives a more organic, progressive tone with the green, earthy color. The logo and wordmark portrays an clear message, very optimistic tone, and editorial format. The illustrations along with the redesign do not seem to flow well with the look, especially with that disturbing mid-tone green color within their palette. Although it reads cheerfulness, the geometric patterns seem overwhelming with the use of their color included, especially when when seeing it through a desktop and mobile app. Overall I believe Evernote’s was to focus on the personal purpose and look rather than be trendy.