Uber’s new logo sure is a bit bizarre

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uber-new-logo-app-icon
Uber's new app icon is already getting insults.
Photo: Uber

Uber dropped a surprise announcement today that it has completely changed its logo and branding. The new logo is only slightly modified, featuring an altered font with letters that are closer together. The bigger news is the new app icon reflecting a total branding change. People already aren’t thrilled with it.

The picture you see above is indeed using the new Uber icon. It’s supposed to represent very small, simple forms of matter and technology coming together: atoms and bits.

https://twitter.com/MicahSingleton/status/694604521620783104

Uber said in its press release that the weird lines in the app icon are part of a bigger picture. Uber’s new design philosophy is to come up with both a color scheme and pattern that represents different parts of the world. For instance, China has its own color scheme and pattern that best fits in with the culture there as does Mexico and India. The team has researched various countries and hopes to even bring this customization down to a city level in the future.

The lines in the app icon are meant to be a culturally relevant pattern surrounding a bit — yes, the small unit of information in computers. That’s well and nice, but the combination of odd lines surrounding the center plus the color scheme make it look like some sort of gaudy enterprise logo.

Tweets have already rolled in about the design change and it seems people don’t quite share the vision Uber does for the new app icon and logo. I have to agree. The new Uber icon looks pretty ugly on my Home screen. Hopefully Uber is open to letting the icon evolve into something, well… less hideous.

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