

Another big complaint is that, OMG, the Starbucks name is not there anymore. Chill people. The name will appear somewhere in the vicinity of the new siren-based logo. It won’t be directly around it, but you can rest assured that if you are walking on the street or browsing an aisle in the grocery store you will see “STARBUCKS” spelled out somewhere. Nike does it. Apple does it. Target does it. It’s not that hard to create a link between an icon and a name. Tangential to the name being dropped is the concern that the siren is not a recognizable enough icon to stand on its own. Please. It is. It just happens to have been dwarfed by the relatively enormous Futura name around it all these years. I would bet my daily morning Starbucks coffee (brewed at home) that the siren will not have any problem establishing itself as a Nike swoosh or Apple apple within one or two years. With the amount of bandwidth that Starbucks occupies in the visual landscape, no one will confuse the siren as it being the icon for a hair salon, tiara manufacturer, or mermaid depot.
Now to the actual result: This is a fantastic, confident evolution. If you look at the image of the coffee cups above you realize how clunky the old logo was and just how extraneous its many elements were. It went from four circles/rings to one. It went from two colors to one. It went from three stars to one. Perfect simplification without losing the essence of the brand. That new cup design alone elevates the identity to an actual lifestyle brand more than a retail brand. It has a newfound sophistication that would have been impossible to achieve before.
Come March it will be interesting to see how the identity system evolves. As hard as I tried this time around to get some additional images no one budged. But I sense there is some interesting executions waiting to be implemented.
Lastly: Please, for those comparing this to Gap (looking at you Reuters, Daily News, et al), don’t. It’s not even close and hopefully the media and the consumer can stop asking for every single redesign to pull a Gap and return to whatever was before or next thing you know we will be driving horse buggies again and afraid of any kind of evolution.