Yahoo Got a New Logo, Now It's Bing's Turn

Yahoo took 30 days to unveil a new logo. After a hint earlier in the year that a rebrand was imminent and months of research including "hundreds of studies to look at motion, font, color, size and form," the new Bing logo launched this week. So we've decided to run a logo design contest to see what our logo design community could do.

'Searchlight' Logo Design Rationale

Bing says the new logo aligns the brand more closely with parent company Microsoft. In a blog post by Bing brand director, Scott Erickon, he outlines the brand's logo development process and design rationale, explainging that Bing's "Searchlight" graphic is really "a system of brand architecture that allows us to strategically and visually ecolve Bing in line with our missions and our products."

The objective behind refreshing the new logo:

To create a new visual identity that best reflected Bing as part of the Microsoft family.

We’ve taken inspiration from the new Bing symbol by taking all angles to infinity and adding in levels of color and transparency to add depth and energy."

Scott Erickson, Bring Brand Director

Logo Review: Keeping it 'flat' in the Microsoft Family

Comments from readers of design review sites Design Taxi and Under Consideration has been mixed. The Verge's review attracted 505 comments from readers critiquing the design and the brand strategy. New logo review site Brand New (by Under Consideration) desribed the "b" as "crazy-looking and doing crazy contortions in a crazy way." Others described the customised Segoe typeface as "boring" and "unbalanced" to "off-kerning". Similarities to another famous triangle logo were observed by some: "The stylized b looks like someone broke the Google Drive icon".

Crowdsourcing an Alternative Bing Logo Design

We were interested in what the design communtiy thought about Bing's new logo so earlier in the week, we launched $525 logo contest to crowdsource some fresh Bing logo design alternatives.

You can read the Bing logo design contest brief here: https://www.designcrowd.de/bing-logo-design-contest

Bing Logo Contest Prize Money

1. 1st place: $275
2. 2nd place: $150
3. Participation payments: 5 x $20 payments

Deadline: Saturday 27 September

The contest runs for another week. Nearly 100 designs have been submitted in the last few days. In this unofficial community contest, we're looking for serious design alternatives as well as satirical or funny design submissions so get cracking!

Written by Jo Sabin on Friday, September 20, 2013

Jo Sabin is Head of Designer Community at DesignCrowd. She's led the company's public relations and social media programs since 2012. With more than ten years' experience working with Australian and international tech startups in the creative industries, Jo has been instrumental in meeting DesignCrowd's objectives in Australia and abroad. Get in touch via Twitter.