You might need a minute before you request your next Uber to locate and or recognize the app icon on your phone as the company unveiled a completely revamped look on Tuesday.
In a blog post on the transportation company’s website, CEO Travis Kalanick revealed everything that was changing and the genesis behind some of those changes. Gone is the app icon with the black “U” and in its place is a circle with a square in the middle, set on a colorful background. The square is meant to represent the bit — a nod to Uber’s technology. The colors and patterns being introduced to the branding represent the atom — the people and things that Uber transports and the places where it operates.
“The unique aspect of Uber is that we exist in the physical world,” Kalanick wrote. “When you push a button on your phone, a car moves across the city and appears where you are. We exist in the place where bits and atoms come together. That is Uber. We are not just technology but technology that moves cities and their citizens.”
The typeface for the company name has also been tweaked, eliminating curves on the letters for a “less fussy, more substantial” look for the maturing company.
Uber plans to roll out unique color patterns for all of the countries and cities it serves. Today that number is 400 cities in 68 countries, according to Kalanick.
Wired.com dives deeper on how the design evolution came to be, calling it a coming-of-age tale for a company that “realized they needed to understand not only the thing they no longer were, but also the thing that Uber was currently, and what it was likely to become.”
