They hired whoever was responsible for the Bing logo?

Pleasantly empty. Like well herbed rice cake.

They hired whoever was responsible for the Bing logo?

Then he/she must have had realized that Google's logo was still doing a better job ;-)

"The newest logo was designed by brand strategy and design firm Lippincott, which has U.S. offices in San Francisco, Boston and New York.

"We wanted to reflect the right amount of change in eBay’s new logo," Su Mathews, a senior partner at Lippincott, said in a statement provided by eBay. "The design is inspired by today’s vibrant marketplace and sleeker experiences. We leveraged the iconic color arrangement and approachable form to reflect eBay’s heritage and evolved it with a brighter blue and darker yellow and a streamlined arrangement to create more visual harmony.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/09/ebay-unveils-new-sleeker...

I applaud the choice of font, but I’m confidant Adrian would turn over in his grave when he saw the trendy, shitty, hard to read, grey type used in the announcement.

@JamesM: haahahahh! I love marketing double-speak like that! If it were me, I’d say:

“We are synergizing our B2C vertical markets in an effort to create robust, scalable solutions that empower turn-key solutions.”

See also: http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

I wonder how much they got paid to play “pick-a-font?” Perhaps I’m not in the wrong line of work after all…

No capital B anymore in ebay?

@Christopher Dean: That reminds me of a nice joke or webcomic strip of a conference where a guy promotes to the board a plan how to restructure a company (crowd source, outsource, other plans) and with all the filling words used, nobody notices that there is no business left any more. Does anybody has a link to it?

@JamsM: Thanks for finding the designer, my search was in vain.

Clearly mechanically stretched, except for the "y". The design firm should rebrand its own identity to Slippinshodd.

hhp

Very generic. Is this part of a strategy? It might be.

I don't like double-speak either, but Su Mathews' quote doesn't strike me that way as it contains comments that are specific to the eBay logo.

> Very generic. Is this part of a strategy?

Looks rather generic to me too. My guess is that eBay didn't want them to stray too far from the old logo, so it became more of a clean-up project.

> No capital B anymore in ebay?

It wasn't a cap in the old one, either. (But the B was a cap when used in text.)

Teletubbies meet Univers 53.

(Reuters) - EBay Inc executive Devin Wenig unveiled a new logo on Thursday, a re-design he said reflected a shift by the online marketplace away from auctions and collectibles toward full-priced, buy-it-now merchandise.

EBay is focusing more on new, fixed-priced sales as it tries to compete better with Amazon.com Inc, which has been growing faster. Wenig said the new logo reflects this new direction.

"It's eBay today: a global online marketplace that offers a cleaner, more contemporary and consistent experience," he wrote.

"Auction-style listings, used goods, vintage items and quirky, one-of-a-kind finds are still a big part of what makes buying and selling on eBay special," Wenig added. "But we've evolved a lot in the past few years, and eBay is much more than auction-style listings today."

Bing should sue...

:-)

But the Bada Bing is safe.

So it's still capital B in text? Why not utilise it in logo too for consistency and uniqueness?

"I applaud the choice of font, but I’m confidant Adrian would turn over in his grave when he saw the trendy, shitty, hard to read, grey type used in the announcement."

Unless you're talking about an Adrian other than Frutiger, he's not currently in a grave.

A review at Brand New:
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/ebay_settles_for_low...

So it's Univers Extended, eh? Ugly (and disappointing). They could have chosen something better (and it's not like this setting of Univers is really preserving anything from the old mishmash of Univers styles).

hhp

Designed by... Sterile & Septic Ltd ...forgettable branding for the 21st century.

n.

I'm far from being a genius in these matters, but to me it looks like most of the creativity went into the press releases. You guys think their coloured-ink savings will suffice to pay for the job?

The bigger branding firms stay tight with big-money clients and promise them that the buzz created by a branding "refresh" will pay dividends in marketing splash. It does not matter what the rebrand looks like, as long as there is a change to talk about, good or bad. "Any publicity is good publicity"

Rebranding is just a way for clients who fear, "Have they forgotten about us?" to have a "fresh" new look come to the rescue to chime points on the media search scale of "how many hits did we get" lately.

That so explains all the me-too-isms and drab concrete.

why does the /e overlap the /b and not kiss it, as that is the relationship between the other letters?

it's hard to believe the overlap is a feature not a bug.

I don't think it's an overlap. The dark spot is what happens when red adjoins blue on your monitor, and perhaps a bit of anti-aliasing. The ridiculous launch page gives you an extreme sideways closeup of exactly how much contact there is.

@Nick – It's not easy to tell from the OP image, even after blowing it up ×4 in Irfanview, but I think that 'e' and 'b' do touch, not overlap.

Assuming the launch site uses the same vectorized image of logo, as the logo itself, the /e/ and /b/ actually overlap, while the other just touch. The details are 90° rotated here, compared to the logo (is it “compared to” or “compared with”?):

Yes, I see from the close-up that it is supposed to kiss.
However, the effect is ill-considered.

The reason is that the /e to /b kiss is not two curved vector paths meeting tangentially at an infinitely small asymptote, as the other two kisses are, but a border where the paths are coincident.

The Univers /e has a straight line edge at the corner of the bowl (see 1, below), which creates a length of simultaneous contrast that is optically jazzy, with perhaps some sub-pixel interference.

And of course, in print, dead-hit registration is damn tricky.

It would be a good idea to modify the vectors of the /e so that they come to a single extrema point (2 or 3, below).