New logo: DeNA

DeNA is a Japanese company that developes mobile portals and online shopping services, which describes itself as "the global leader in mobile Internet services". Today, January 10, it launched a new corporate identity.

The logo is an expression of the new tagline "Delight and Impact the World", where the D has been turned into an emoticon, representing delight. The exercise also sees some of the company's global subsidiaries being rebranded with the corporate name.

Update January 10: Wolff Olins recently announced that they created the new brand identity together with Japanese branding agency Hakuhodo.
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New logo: Flywheel

Cabulous, a mobile app that helps people order a taxi, was relaunched last week as Flywheel. The new identity was developed by Moving Brands, who are promising more information in the future. Until then, we have a nice icon portraying a wheel with wings, that perhaps reminds one of the letter F. It lives in a clean vivid visual environment.
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New logo: Here maps

Yesterday, November 13, Nokia unveiled the name for their digital map service that will utilise Nokia's expertise in digital mapping, as well as the technology of a recently purchase 3D mapping company called Earthmine. It will simply be called Here and be accessible across multiple devices. The new logo consists of the word here, tilted at an angle. The service's official Twitter account says "the tilted logo symbolizes the pin on a map".
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New logo: Ebay

Ebay is by far the world's largest auction site, founded way back in 1995. Yesterday, September 13, it unveiled a new logo. The familiar logo with its quirky overlapping letters is being replaced by a straightened up version set in tightly kerned Univers Extended. The color scheme is kept, to retain some familiarity.

The new logo should reflect what Ebay wants to be today, that is "an online marketplace that offers a cleaner, more contemporary and consistent experience", an Ebay where many items are new and sold through the fixed price "Buy now" option.
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New logo: Telly

Twitvid was originally created for people who wanted to share videos on Twitter, essentially a video version of Twitpic. Over time it has developed into a more independent site where people can discovery videos from Twitvid's own library as well as other websites. Some months ago it shed its Twitter-esque logo and last week, on June 13, it also announced that it would give up its old name to become "Telly". The logo above came with the announcement.
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New logo: Twitter

One of the big topics on Twitter yesterday was that the service itself had launched a major update of its identity. From June 6, the familiar Twitter wordmark, with its regonisable T, is history. Twitter has joined those few brands that have such confidence in their symbol that they no longer feel the need for a wordmark. Twitter will now be represented by the blue bird alone.

For its promotion, the Twitter bird has gotten a haircut and appears slimmer and more elegant. Its body is geometric and made up of a set of circles. The most noticeable change is the bird's trajectory. No longer comfortably flying above the ground, he is now soaring up into the air. Oh, the symbolism.
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New logo: Rutube

Rutube is, as one might guess, a Russian website that allows users to post videos, very much built as "the Russian YouTube". A few years after its foundation it was bought by Russia's largest media group, the state-controlled Gazprom Media, and has thrived commercially under that ownership. This week, it unveiled a new logo that will launch in June.

Continuing its emulation of succesful American social websites, Rutube hired Cuban Council, the agency that came up with the logo for Facebook. And the result is arguably very similar, a simple wordmark set in humanist/geometric typeface. Except Rutube uses a red background colour where Facebook is using blue.

The typeface is custom-made and is called RuNew.
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New logo: Shutterstock

Shutterstock is one of the large Internet-based agencies for stock photography and other images. Yesterday, May 2, it launched a new corporate identity, developed with Lippincott, aimed at differenting Shutterstock from its competitors and signaling a new brand positioning.

At the center of the new identity is a graphic device called the "Viewfinder", which replaces the letter O in the wordmark. Shutterstock says the Viewfinder "symbolizes the artistic empowerment of Shutterstock customers and contributors to express their unique perspective – whether they’re behind the lens or in front of the screen". The Viewfinder can also be used to frame interesting aspects on images.
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New logo: Now TV

Britain's satellite broadcaster BSkyB announced the launch of a new Internet TV service last week, which will offer access to Sky's content on broadband devices. It will be called "Now TV", and although it will not have "Sky" in its name, it will carry a "powered by Sky" tagline to instill consumer trust. The logo above came with the announcement on March 21, and is using a modified version of Sky's corporate typeface.
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New logo: Google Play

Although the upcoming third iPad (which is not called iPad 3) has been the focus of attention for the tech crowd this week, some attention has been given to the fact that Google have merged Android Market with its music store Google Music to form Google Play. It was launched on Tusday, March 6, and hopes to become a one-stop location for apps, music, movies and books.
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New logo: Hotels.com

Hotels.com, an international website for booking hotel rooms online, unveiled a new visual identity yesterday, February 14.

Until now, Hotels.com have used a red logo in United States and Canada and a completely different yellow script logo for the rest of the world. A press release states the new logo is part of a "globally unified marketing platform", the new wordmark has been implemented on the North American websites, while the other versions are still using the yellow logo. The same release states that the new look will launch in full during Q2 in most countries.
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New logo: Blip

Blip.tv is an online platform for original web video series. This week, on December 20, it shortened its name to "Blip" and introduced a new fresh logo that had the added prestige of being designed at Chermayeff & Geismar.
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New logo: YouTube

A big web-related story at the beginning of this month was a major facelift for the video-sharing site Youtube. In addition to an overhauled page layout, it brought a refresh to the Youtube logo.

Where the previous "screen" had both a glare and a gradient, the new one only has a subtle, slightly darker gradient. This update seems directed at evolving and going back to basics, scaling back some of the fancy effects, just like previous Google-related logo changes. For example, the update of the main Google logo last year brought brighter colors and scaled back bevels and drop shadows, but didn't change the integrity of the logo.

The last time Youtube updated their logo was in 2006.
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New logo: Cnet

Cnet has reintroduced the classic "pipe" logo it used when it launched in the 1990s, three years after the popular technology site replaced it with a simpler wordmark on a red sphere.

The "pipeless" logo was part of a site redesign that saw them give up its neon yellow background and "web 1.0" aesthetics. It was first previewed in June 2008, around the time the site was purchased by CBS Corporation. The new design finally launched on August 27, 2008. Overall, that redesign centered around simplicity, and the dropping of the pipe was part of this approach.

The resurrected logo has been given a "disc-like" effect, somewhat similar to the current ABC logo. It has been used at least since the early part of October.
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New logo: Onet.pl

Onet.pl is a popular Polish web portal. Last week, it announced a new site design, which included an updated logo. Onet worked with the Polish branch of Dragon Rouge to develop the new look.

The previous logo had been used by the portal for over a decade. The new logo is lighter and drops the "pl" part, but keeps the dot. The colour of the dot now changes depending on what section of the site one visits. The site also features decorations made up of multi-coloured dots, represting the variety of content found on the site.

Previous logo.

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New logo: Odnoklassniki

Odnoklassniki (Одноклассники in Russian, meaning "Classmates") is a social networking site founded in 2006 which is popular in Russia and adjacent countries. This month it launched a new logo.

The new logo was created in-house. It contains a symbol based on the initials О and К. Those initials have another well-known meaning which applies in Russia as well, and the vertical combination also looks like a little person.

Russian media reported about the logo change around June 9, although it had reportedly been leaked on the site's front page back in April.



Previous logo.

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New logo: Rambler

Rambler is a Russian web portal and search engine, which also owns publications such as the arts magazine Afisha and the news site Lenta.ru. On June 1, it presented a new logo  which should replace its "plasma ball" logo. Reportedly, the new look should have been launched today, June 6, but it seems that is yet to happen.

The new logo is credited to art director Irina Voloshina and New York-based brand consultant Eugene Timerman. It inroduces a new compass symbol in three colours. The name switches from latin to cyrillic letters.

The "plasma ball" logo.

Rambler attemped to introduce another redesign last year which was was created by Wolff Olins. That was however rejected by management.
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New logo: .рф

ICANN, the organization which is responsible for assigning top-level domains (TLD) on the Internet, has relaxed its policies for the last few years by introducing several new TLDs. For example, it seems organizations will soon be able to buy their own TLD (.google, .apple etcetera). Another change is the introduction of country domains that use letters that are not in the Latin alphabet.

On of the first country TLDs to not use the Latin alphabet was Russia's .рф domain which launched on May 13, 2010. .рф is an abbreviation of Российская Федерация, which means "Russian Federation" in Russian. Recently, the first anniversary of the TLD was celebrated by unveiling a new logo to market it, through a dedicated website. The work is credited to the Russian branding company CETIS.

The mark is made up of a straightforward rendering of the domain name, with a nice symmetry in the р and ф letters. Inside this mark, one can clip different images that reference Russian culture. Ten variants with different images have been published on the website

I'm not certain what this identity will be used for. The website contains many different examples of identity applications with the new logo seen on everything from desktop wallpapers- t-shirts and buttons to flags, airplanes, skyscrapers and blimps (!). It would be fun to see how many of these applications come to fruition, or if most of them were just fun Photoshop experiments.

The amount of downloadable files is immense and includes 12 logo variants, 12 wallpapers, 20 identity applications and a 24 megabyte pdf with logo guidelines and even more applications. Some highlights are presented below.
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New logo: Ankabut

A "National research and education network" (NREN) is an Internet network set up to support academic institutions. Most countries have their own national NREN. In the United Arab Emirates, the NREN is called ANKABUT, which means "spider".

Recently, the network got a new brand identity. It was created by Brash Brands, who announced their work through a press release on May 19, but it seems it had been around for a while before that.



A previous logo.

The rebrand replaces an inconsistent, outdated and technology-minded logo with something more contemporary. Brash Brands offers the following explantion of their symbol:

Taking from this new initiative's vision of providing endless possibilities primarily through collaboration, the brandmark represents a living and breathing ecosystem where multiple pathways interconnect and exchange information and knowledge. Supporting this, the wordmark has been designed to incorporate modern and user friendly aesthetic cues apparent from its crafted typographic curvature and spatial consideration.

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New logo: Google Chrome icon (?)

Over week ago, it was reported that the open source web browser Chromium was about to get a new icon, a flattened version of the previous glossy 3D model colored in shades of blue. Chromium is the attic cousin of Google's web browser Google Chrome, which uses a similar icon, but instead of a blue it is coloured with Google's signature colors. It was quickly assumed that Google Chrome would be getting a similar icon makeover.

If Google didn't release the new Google Chrome icon themselves, mock-ups and fake versions of varying quality would inevitably start spreading on the web. I haven't seen any official use of the new icon myself, but an increasing amount of sources are now reporting limited use of the logo above by Google Chrome. Hopefully, this will be confirmed by an official Google source soon.

Update: Cnet are reporting that the new icon was introduced on March 15 and that the logo was first used with a developer release called Chrome 11.0.696.12.
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