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New Best Buy logo diminishes the shopping tag because brick-and-mortar stores are dead

New Best Buy logo diminishes the shopping tag because brick-and-mortar stores are dead

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Another san-serif font and minimalist logo

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Best Buy has redesigned its iconic logo. It sets the company’s newly updated wordmark free from the giant yellow tag it’s been confined in for the past few decades and reduces the tag to a more subtle logo in the corner instead (via AdAge).

According to Best Buy, the rebranding is “designed to highlight our culture, our expertise and our talented employees,” which seems like a lot to convey with just a slightly taller font and less of a dutch tilt. But who I am to judge the company’s “evolution toward the future”?

Nothing says “new, updated logo for the future” like a sans-serif font

A more cynical-minded person might take the stance that Best Buy is finally becoming cognizant of the fact that brick-and-mortar retail is slowly going extinct, and the once iconic price tag is quickly becoming as obsolete as the floppy disc. Or it could simply be that the old logo looked, well, old. And nothing says “new, updated logo for the future” like a sans-serif font and a logo that’s been minimized down to the bare essence of where it began. (See: Rotten Tomatoes, Comfort Inn, Century 21, E3, the ACLU, Rimowa, Google, Verizon, and many, many others.)

It’s not actually clear what the definitive version of Best Buy’s new logo is. According to Best Buy, the updated logo will retain the “bold, black font” of the original, but so far the company is primarily using a white-on-blue version. There is one instance of a black-on-white logo that went out with the announcement, but that’s it. (I’ve also put together what a black-on-blue logo might look like with the updated logo because this has been a slow descent into madness for me.) What I’m saying is, it doesn’t seem that Best Buy has quite figured out everything about where and how to use the new logo.

I am reasonably confident that one of these combinations is actually Best Buy’s new logo.
I am reasonably confident that one of these combinations is actually Best Buy’s new logo.

Now, for some reason, all this talk about new logos has me weirdly thirsty. Can’t quite figure out why, though...