DigiKey unveils their new logo/branding

[thm_w]

Slightly more interesting:
https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/minnesota/thief-river-falls-man-charged-in-death-of-digi-key-employee-man-used-sign-to-strike-victim
https://trftimes.com/news/22223/trf-man-charged-with-murder-outside-of-digi-key

Was murdered but outside of the digikey warehouse.

Seems kinda silly to open a new warehouse with a big logo branded on the side of it only to change the company logo 8 months later, but I'm not paid to be a CEO...
[outube.com/watch?v=cyA3an_bVUk[/url]

lol come on man, thats such a small thing, digikey revenue is 3 billion dollars. Some thousand dollars on a sign is nothing.

Also possible at some companies, they don't even bother updating the sign.

[rsjsouza]

If they had done what almost everyone else does these days, they would have come up with this:

No doubt some will prefer it, actually, but as far as being memorable and unique, not so much.

Silicon, I think you used the wrong palette that does not conform to the new web fancy school of design. Such new logo would be something like this. 

[SiliconWizard]

Ahah.

This is arm's black logo:
https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/logos/Arm-logo-black-pms432.svg

[Siwastaja]

If they had done what almost everyone else does these days, they would have come up with this:

No doubt some will prefer it, actually, but as far as being memorable and unique, not so much.

Silicon, I think you used the wrong palette that does not conform to the new web fancy school of design. Such new logo would be something like this. 

Great logo, here's my take at whole new website design for Digikey.

[voltsandjolts]

Oh-oh.

They removed the - from digi-key.
What's the chances that all my Altium library links stop working in six months time

[EPAIII]

Several million? Well, I guess I can believe that for a company as big as DigiKey. Personally I would never do such a thing, but I too have seen it happen. And, IMHO, in all the cases the old logo was a lot better.

When I decided that I was a company (of one) I also wanted a logo. Did it myself so it only cost a few hours. That was around 20 years ago and I see no reason to change it.

As far as DigiKey vs Mouser or any others, what counts for me is availability and price. I don't even notice the logos.

...<snip>...

In this, a new logo is obviously necessary to stoke the new CEO's ego, and erect her/his monument for the future. Usually costs several million $ (all documentation, brochures, signs, exhibition material, products, packaging, you name it has to be changed).

...<snip>...

[Psi]

I dont care about the logo, i wish they had instead spent time fixing minor website annoyance.

Like letting you have default search options, like having In Stock and Exclude marketplace set by default.

Or

Fix the annoying thing where (if you have purchased enough $ from digikey to get custom discounted prices) you can't see all volume prices because your custom prices show by default and they don't include all the price breakdowns for the part.  eg, part has 1k price but your discounted price list don't have the 1k breakdown, so you cant see it unless clicking back to standard pricing.

Or

Add a tickbox to only show parts with over x qty in stock so i dont have to order by QTY and lose my order by price.

[HwAoRrDk]

Great logo, here's my take at whole new website design for Digikey.

Ahahaha, I worked with a design agency once about 15 years ago whose website was basically just that, except white text on black! It was so minimalist it was painful.

[MarkS]

It looks positively stupid. It gives me 1980's Macintosh Chicago font vibes and not the Truetype variant either. It looks like someone in marketing let their 8 year old design the new logo.

[floobydust]

I was wrong- there was a giveaway of some Digi-Key merchandise celebrating their 50th year in business. Oh but wait it's the OLD logo... loser lol.
The big new warehouse apparently has some restaurants and on-site health clinic so it's not all a bot shop.

I agree the new logo is lacklustre, primitive and boring but is the hyphen there or not? I have to delete it from BOM and CADD libraries for the vendor name? Erase all Internet references to the "-"  It's like a one character programming language feud started over the "="

Still looking forward to being able to sort by voltage or less than/greater than for some component categories on the website.

[newbrain]

I honestly like the new logo a lot more of the old one.
It was next to unreadable, not giving a real identity and looked really cheap.
The new one, if not great, I find quite decent, and at least they eschewed the "generic sans-serif" disease of many other brands.

It's quite normal for big brands to go for a logo and visual language update every now and then.
Where I work, we did that in 2018, with, I must say, quite good results.
Among other changes, the logo (very iconic and dating to the early 80's - the original one dated to the late 1800's) was not radically updated: a change of a couple of degrees in the slant of its graphics elements, to make it more suitable for low res displays and easier to anti-alias for higher resolution ones.

[mikeselectricstuff]

It's quite normal for big brands to go for a logo and visual language update every now and then.
Where I work, we did that in 2018, with, I must say, quite good results.

What results exactly ? More customers, more profit , better service?

[newbrain]

What results exactly ? More customers, more profit , better service?

All of those three indicators improved.
I'm not the one that can assign causes and effects and many were of course at play in the last 5 years.
I would say it did not hurt, and our logo is, as said, so iconic that I do not expect it to really change for the coming future.

The new visual language is also more pleasant for us working with it.
In fact, with "good results" I was thinking more of the aesthetic side than the impact on the bottom line.

Are these changes absolutely needed? Probably not, but branding is an important part of how a large firm presents itself on the market.
Disregarding, if not disparaging, marketing and branding, as many here seem to do, is, IMHO, a bit naïve.
 

[Ranayna]

I think this is something inherently human.
Something new, even if it is just a logo, sparks curiosity.

One thing with Digikey is interesting: I barely noticed the dash. It is not relevant when spoken, but is often a hindrance when typing, since especially mobile, the dash is often a special character.
Since noone would say "digi dash key", ditching the dash officially seems to be a smart move.

Also, looking at the wayback machine, there essentially always was www.digi-key.com and www.digikey.com, the former redirecting to the latter since at least 10 years now. So why expect broken URLs now?

[tom66]

I honestly like the new logo a lot more of the old one.
It was next to unreadable, not giving a real identity and looked really cheap.
The new one, if not great, I find quite decent, and at least they eschewed the "generic sans-serif" disease of many other brands.

As logo designs go it's fairly inoffensive and I tend to agree the old one was a bit, err, "overdone". 

That said I think it's a bit odd to stray so far from a logo that has been the same for quite some time.  Maybe it would have been better to modernise the badge design, perhaps removing the small "corporation" text and de-bossing the badge so it looks more flat and modern.

[SiliconWizard]

I honestly like the new logo a lot more of the old one.
It was next to unreadable, not giving a real identity and looked really cheap.
The new one, if not great, I find quite decent, and at least they eschewed the "generic sans-serif" disease of many other brands.

Agreed.

As I illustrated with the arm logo (now all lowercase, arial font). It could be anything. When going from ARM to arm, they should have gone all the way and renamed themselves "arm & leg".

It's quite normal for big brands to go for a logo and visual language update every now and then.

Yes.

[Psi]

It's quite normal for big brands to go for a logo and visual language update every now and then.

Usually because the higher-ups need to justify themselves as actually 'doing something'.

But doing something that is actually useful for the company is complicated and takes real effort.
So they do the easy stuff instead. Things that need decisions but have little consequences, like the colors and look of logos.
Instead of things that need decisions which will cause large company changes that could get them fired or make them look bad if they make a mistake.

It's human nature, but engineers see right through it.

[james_s]

As logo designs go it's fairly inoffensive and I tend to agree the old one was a bit, err, "overdone". 

That said I think it's a bit odd to stray so far from a logo that has been the same for quite some time.  Maybe it would have been better to modernise the badge design, perhaps removing the small "corporation" text and de-bossing the badge so it looks more flat and modern.

I don't particularly care about the logo, I care about the fact that they're wasting time and money "fixing" a logo that wasn't broken when there are other actual problems that need fixing. I usually see rebranding as a red flag, I've seen quite a few retail stores rebrand shortly before floundering.

[schmitt trigger]

There are many fine examples of terrible logo changes, and if a contest would be made to find the worst of the worst, the top place would be awarded to General Motors.

Runner up: OnSemi, or should I write instead, onsemi.

[tggzzz]

I've never understood why companies do this.

That's easy if you see it from the canopy management PoV:

• things are static or declining; bonuses are at risk
• canopy management either doesn't know how to improve that or cannot improve that
• MBAs/conslutants are appointed to investigate and suggest changes
• the net result is no different to 2
• but Something must be done + this (new coat of paint) is Something => this must be done

Basically pissing about with branding is an orange flag to employees and customers. Engineers are intelligent; they recognise orange flags, even if MBAs think they don't.

[bsfeechannel]

https://www.digikey.com/en/news/press-releases/2023/may/digikey-unveils-updated-logo-and-brand

A sad day for the old logo. Otherwise, nothing has changed...

I like the color.

[AndyBeez]

I remember when British Airways decided to paint 'art' on the tails of our fleet because the union flag branding was regarded as, in today's speak, not woke. Huge mistake.
Branding is so hard to get right and so much easier to make a fortune getting it very wrong.

Digikey? Kind of reminds me of the Radio Spares logo which has not changed in decades. Maybe that was the mission.

[TimNJ]

No problem with the new logo, really. If I were them, I probably would’ve just flattened out the old logo, which still had that Microsoft Office 2007 embossed effect thing going on. The oval was sort of a defining part. If they wrapped the new font in an oval, that might’ve kept it a little more on brand.

But meh, it’s mostly a nothing burger to me.

[TimNJ]

There, I fixed it?

[floobydust]

Marty start the DeLorean! go back to a time when people had some creativity and the ability to be edgy lol.
Digi-Key was plain text 1974 then 1975 added the DIP IC. I like the late 80's striped one.