The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding | WIRED
▻http://www.wired.com/2016/02/the-inside-story-behind-ubers-colorful-redesign
From left: Shalin Amin, Mirtho Prepont, Roger Oddone, Travis Kalanick (CEO), Catherine Ray and Bryant Jow at the Uber HQ office in San Francisco. Talia Herman for WIRED
“The early app was an attempt at something luxury,” says Kalanick. “That’s where we came from, but it’s not where are today.”
Today, you’ll find Uber in 400 cities in 65 countries. Almost two-thirds of its 6,000 or so people have been with the company less than one year.
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For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalin Amin and a dozen or so others, hammering out ideas from a stuffy space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.”
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Anyone can draw an icon, he told them. What’s the story behind it? As they sketched on the wall and sifted through materials, the group began to focus on a blog post Kalanick had written, in which he described Uber’s culture as the combination of bits and atoms. Bits represented the machine efficiency involved in Uber’s mapping and dispatch software. The atoms represented people.
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The problem was that even Kalanick realized he shouldn’t be controlling everything. It felt wrong for Uber’s global and local brands to revolve around the color preferences of a rich, white guy in California—even if that rich, white guy in California is the CEO. “We walked out and we were like, this is crazy—we’re designing a brand for Travis,” says Amin. At some point, Amin realized the process would be easier if the group established a set of principles other designers could follow. That’s when they hit on the idea of designing different color palettes for different regions.
cf. Uber-Taxi und der Übermensch
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