In the 15 years PayPal has been handling our money, there’s been little change in how it presents itself to the world. The company’s technological advancements—things like Beacon and PayPal Here—have been downplayed by its visual steadfastness over the years. “If you stop people on the street and ask them if they know PayPal, invariably they will say yes,” says David Marcus, president of PayPal. “But when you start asking questions about how it works or what it does for you, you start getting very different levels of understanding.”
PayPal had a perception problem, and it wasn't good for business. So today the company launched a new visual identity—the first total redesign in seven years, and only the second in its history. Led by Yves Béhar and his Fuseproject team, the updated logo is the first effort in a giant marketing push to redefine what kind of company PayPal plans to be in the future.
The timing couldn’t be better for a refresh. Since its beginnings, PayPal has positioned itself as an innovative alternative to traditional financial institutions. Problem was, after years leading the digital payment pack, the company’s brand was starting to resemble the stodgy financial systems it once challenged.
Béhar's team did a visual audit of the old logo to assess the company’s branding issues and made two big findings: “It scored high in trust, but it didn’t score high in innovation,” he says. For all its digital savvy, PayPal’s legacy was firmly rooted in the digital of yesteryear. “The old logo was really designed at a time when people's experiences of digital payments was online,” explains Béhar.
To compete with younger, mobile-native apps like Venmo, PayPal needed to show its flexibility. Béhar’s big goal was bringing the visual identity to a mobile age, and in order to do that, he needed cut out some of the fat.
The new logo has been condensed and modernized without losing the core of PayPal’s identity. The new wordmark was changed to a more youthful Futura typeface and was spaced closer together to create a mobile-ready compactness. There’s also the brighter, bolder blues, which Béhar says will distinguish PayPal from other financial businesses, which themselves often default to the color.
Most obvious is the new monogram, an overlapping double-P that has a transparent patch in the center (meant to visualize the idea of bringing people together through a transaction). This monogram is the heart of the new logo. When you’re walking down the street and see a sign saying they accept PayPal? This is what you’ll see. “We were trying to create a logo mark that is much more recognizable through it’s shorthand,” Béhar says.
These are relatively subtle changes in the grand scheme of redesigns, but given PayPal's responsibilities (that is, making sure your money is safe), Béhar was facing some serious constraints. “If you think about the million of places PayPal appears…” he says. “When you redesign a logo that people look for on a webpage or smartphone on a daily basis, there’s a responsibly to do something that will have a sense of legacy for what was there before.” It’s a good point, and one that's particularly relevant to a business like PayPal. When your logo is supposed to be a beacon of financial security, a total visual overhaul might do more harm than good.
