A tale of two logos
This week handed us a near-perfect compare and contrast. Two of the world’s most recognisable tech brands updated their logos within days of each other. One landed well. The other landed so badly our head of design asked whether we should double-check the date, because surely this had to be April Fools’.
Spotify’s disco ball
On 13 May, Spotify swapped its flat green circle for a glittering 3D disco ball to mark its 20th birthday. After a swift user backlash, the streamer has now confirmed the regular 2D logo will return next week. That round trip took roughly four days.
The criticism wasn’t snobbery, but functional. Variety noted that at first glance on a small screen the mirrorball wasn’t even obvious, looking instead like the Spotify logo had been wrapped in cellophane. Reporting from DesignRush captured the wider mood with one Reddit user saying “every time I look at it I think the app is busy updating”, and described the icon as cluttered, distracting and harder to recognise at smaller sizes. Spotify’s own response, “Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone. Our temp glow up ends soon”, was a graceful concession, but it doesn’t undo the lesson.
The disco ball broke the one rule an app icon can’t afford to break. It has to be legible at 60 pixels on a crowded home screen. Texture, gloss and reflective detail are fine on a poster. They are noise at icon scale. The three-soundwave mark, which is Spotify’s actual equity, got buried inside the effect rather than amplified by it. It’s a redesign that prioritised the press release (“disco ball for our 20th!”) over the daily user experience.
It’s worth noting the precedent here. Gap’s 2010 logo redesign was reversed within a week after public outcry, and Spotify’s u-turn has landed in much the same territory. Familiar marks belong to their users as much as their owners, and that’s a lesson big brands keep relearning the hard way.
Google Gemini
Compare that to Google’s quiet update to the Gemini star, announced this week at Google I/O as part of a new visual identity Google is calling Neural Expressive. Dezeen reported the change as part of a wider refresh including new typography and vibrant colours, alongside redesigns across Google’s app icons.
The previous Gemini mark was a blue and purple four-pointed star. Perfectly fine, but visually adrift from the rest of Google’s ecosystem. The new version keeps the star but recolours it in a gradient of Google’s signature red, yellow, green and blue, with curved points that soften the shape.
This is the bit worth dwelling on. It’s a tiny intervention. Same shape. Same role on the screen. But by pulling in the parent brand’s colour palette, Gemini stops looking like a separate AI product bolted onto Google and starts looking like it was always meant to be there. As one design commentary put it, the new logo finally makes Gemini feel “part of the family” rather than an estranged AI tool sitting outside the Workspace.
It works for three reasons. It scales, because a star is one of the most legible shapes there is. It earns its colour, because those four colours aren’t decorative, they’re decades of brand equity, and using them signals this is core Google, not an experiment. And it looks tappable, because the rounded points and gradient give it the affordance of a button, something you want to press. That matters for a product whose whole purpose is to be invoked.
The lesson for the rest of us
The contrast isn’t really good logo versus bad logo. Both teams are full of talented people. The real contrast is between a redesign that asked “what will get attention?” and one that asked “what will work?”
A logo isn’t a campaign asset. It’s a piece of UI that has to perform, at small sizes, on cluttered screens, every day. The Spotify disco ball is a great moodboard image. The Gemini star is a great icon. Only one of those needs to exist at 60 pixels in your pocket.
When our head of design asked whether the Spotify reveal was an April Fools’, that wasn’t a joke. It was the most honest possible critique. Good design quietly does its job. When a logo makes you stop and squint to check the date, the design has already failed.