We’re excited to announce our first major rebranding work since we launched Animoto.com in 2007.
Welcome to the new Animoto! Today we’re proud to announce a friendlier, softer, cleaner brand, starting with our logo.
Six years ago we began as the quintessential tiny-office-and-coffee-shop startup, and we’ve had the same logo ever since, the black-and-white punk-Japanime skateboard-sticker thing you’ve probably seen. It was the creation of our co-founder and president, Jason Hsiao. No joke, he made it using shapes and effects in Powerpoint! And somehow it stuck. We still laugh about it.
Startups are funny like that. They grow in a hodgepodge sorta way, with the ideas and designs of new product managers, engineers, and designers getting added to the pile until one day you realize your brand hasn’t kept up with your product or your customers, and the whole thing has lost some of its cohesion along the way. These are some of our (many!) old homepages, for example.
In late 2011 we realized that our gritty, graffiti-inspired urban logo was no longer speaking to our customers, who use us to capture the most important moments and memories of their lives and businesses. Animoto videos are used not just for celebrations like birthdays and weddings, for example, but also for many memorial services each year. We needed something softer, something more human.
With the help of some brilliant talent at Method, we arrived at a lighter, fresher, more friendly logo and look: a splash of colorful, in-the-moment excitement underpinned by a soft, muted nostalgia. The shape is inspired by the Animoto ‘A’ but turns it into a vessel of light, like a little film projector, allowing colors to mix and interplay in beautiful ways. We feel that this encapsulates our goal at Animoto: to bring out the bright colors of people’s memories in beautiful, sometimes even unexpected ways through the magic of video. (Insider’s tip: the green and blue color combination is just the first…)
