Yo fish! Here is Round 2 of our exploration of a refreshed Glassdoor brand identity, working with our friends at Koto.
gldr.co/3fJzxYt for animations and attribution.
This evolution combines elements from directions 1 and 3 from the last round. It begins to show how things work together as a design system.
Tell us why you like it or how you think we could make it better. Thanks for playing along!
Pro
This feels like a winner to me 🏆. Font is perfect for feeling like it’s there to present facts, but doesn’t feel overwhelming.
Looking at the linked slide decks, everything feels in perspective and I LOVE the animations. The illustrations bring a really great sense of levity to everything.
I agree
I love the quotations, but then using lowercase gd as the logo while having the full word "GLASSDOOR" in uppercase feels like it's not really paying homage to the logo. Could we see what it looks like in all lowercase in the same font as the quotations, so that the gd quotation design is more obvious?
Also agreed on the colors. Our newish internal logo that was on our last round of swag of green, yellow, and blue is great. I think taking our the orange, purple, and pink would be a good move. they make it look childish.
My apologies if my comment wasn’t clear, I like the lowercase gd quotation logo! I just think the fully written out word “GLASSDOOR” should be lowercase, “glassdoor” with the g and d in glassdoor being the same characters as in the gd quotation logo. Would love to see how that looks, I think it would make the gd logo more inpactful.
Don’t quotes have 2 apostrophes?
Love it! It's fresh, edgy, and different. This is gonna make a splash!
Amazing! I especially love that intro animated text, it encapsulates a very real thought process perfectly.
The one thing creative humans love is personalization—I think this idea of multi themes within one branding system is clever!
Is this something that would potentially lend itself to even more opportunities to either collaborations with companies or even like a “personality-esque” individualization of sorts?
I can see this really developing as someone’s personal branding when interacting with a company or vice versa.
All in all I prefer the informative, typographic design approach as a whole over the stylized characters. I like those as secondary feature items—seeing that those trends could fade quickly, a universally understood well designed type treatment goes a much longer way in my opinion.
Congrats on round 2 & Good job to the teams !
I love how bright and bold everything is!
Overall agree with the approach but dislike execution. It looks very outdated, not modern, and the branding of Glassdoor isn’t prominent or differentiating. I strongly dislike the color palette - it’s the worst shade from each color. The illustrations dilute the content -it makes issues/topics appear less serious when sometimes they need to be taken more seriously.
Bowl Leader
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, C1. Focusing on how we might apply the illustration system, your point is well taken. In the future Glassdoor will be a place for topics from the scientific (economic data) and the sensitive (career earning potential) to the serious (a company’s DEI commitment) and lighthearted (conversations about, I dunno…office parties), and our illustration system is going to have to work across all of them. The people who use our platform are smart, capable, and empowered, and we are here to help them navigate the next step in their life. While we would never want to get in their way of serious information, we think there’s room as a brand to be a bit more playful when the situation calls for it.
Design is fresh and fun but the concepts themselves are difficult to understand at a quick glance. I have no idea why Glassdoor is in quotes? Why is the blank salary line redacted? Etc etc. way too conceptual and inside your own brains.
Bowl Leader
And Nina, thanks for your comment as well and no apology needed! With Koto’s help, we explored a territory (not shown here) that leaned into the idea of radical transparency, Glassdoor’s core value. Try as we might, it proved difficult to visualize the idea of transparency, particularly in a logo.
Some brands, let’s say Target, have the benefit of a logo that stands in for their name. An image of a glass door, which presumably our previous icon was meant to suggest, lacks visual distinctiveness; we no longer use it.
We will continue to explore logo color as well as letter spacing and unique letter forms as we refine this logo further.
Have we thought about the implication for using this brand for international? For example the quotation marks are different in different countries.
Also curious if these colors have been tested for accessibility (are they better or worse than our current brand colors)
Thanks!
Bowl Leader
Thanks for the questions, GD7. Assuming we move forward with the quotation mark idea, we would likely treat the quote marks as part of the logo. Just as we don’t translate “Glassdoor” into different languages, we would treat the quotes the same way, not, for instance, converting them to les guillemets for French speakers.
Koto has been meticulous in testing palette options for accessibility, and we’ll continue on that path as we continue to refine the colors. Thanks!
This is a nice solution. It’s a lot more graphic, and the icon-like illustrations lend themselves well to the category-ish like information that we look from Glassdoor. Nice job