I really appreciated the spectrum[0] from informal internal usage of the brand all the way to the hardcore, "on message" usage in the actual product.
Unless you're on the design team for a large company, it's easy to forget that other people use assets differently and you can't just copy and paste something from a hackathon poster into something that appears on the marketing website.
The thought that goes into changes like this is deep and complex. It's also not glamorous nor does it get prioritized often. Great write up.
But if you look at the old wordmark and the new not yet implemented wordmark side by side, you can barely tell the difference between the two after careful scrutiny - and that is looking at both side by side blown up to big proportions.
In real life no one will notice the difference. And the favicon is now flat without a bevel. That would have taken about 10 minutes.
Seems like a lot of work for nothing in the wordmark change.
"What do you mean it took you a week to fix that bug? I checked the commit log, and all you did was change a < into a >. That should not have taken you more than 10 seconds."
It's akin to refactoring code for designers.
You do it so that there is more clarity and consistency in a visual system that is complex.
In addition to helping implement the brand in the short term across teams and products, a redesign like this also gives the brand a clear foundation on which to grow and evolve, instead of being fragmented.
A huge part of being a designer in a large company comes down to figuring out how to design systems. The impact of adjusting 4px probably did occur in 10 min in a design program. But the conversations and thought that went into the overall system took far far longer and required a huge amount of knowledge of how systems like this are used and implemented.
A lot of these changes are very small, but they are meant to work on a subconscious level. A good example for me is fixed width font. When programming, I find some fonts to be pleasant to work with, and other unpleasant. It's not a extreme reaction, just some font's "feel" better.
It's a very subconscious thing, how we appreciate two similar things with slight changes, and often we would struggle to explain why we feel that way. It just 'feels' better.
I am not a visual designer and I can immediately differentiate between the word marks. I can't say that one is "better" than the other, but certainly consistency within a brand is a worthy objective. If they mismatched the lettering, I definitely wouldn't actively notice it, but a very small improvement summed over a billion users does make an impact.
Unless you're on the design team for a large company, it's easy to forget that other people use assets differently and you can't just copy and paste something from a hackathon poster into something that appears on the marketing website.
The thought that goes into changes like this is deep and complex. It's also not glamorous nor does it get prioritized often. Great write up.
[0] http://officeofbenbarry.com/images/portfolio/1200/benbarry-0...