A few days ago I logged onto ebay and was greeted with a new logo. The problem with this new logo, however, is that it really doesn’t look like a logo.
It looks like someone typed “ebay” in lowercase with Helvetica Extended and made every character a different colour. It reminds me of another internet based company that also has a logo with every character in a different colour. The difference is that Google uses a font that I can’t immediately recognise (Catull). And the characters have a slight bevel. Although I wouldn’t usually advocate bevels in logos, Google pulls it off quite well.
But I digress. The problem with the new ebay logo is that there is absolutely nothing special about it. They took their existing logo and “unlogo’ed” it.
Let’s compare it to the old logo:
The old logo actually looked like a logo. Sure, it wasn’t the best logo in the world. But if I printed it on my black and white printer, it would still look like a logo.
Overall, not a great redesign.
