Logo redesign in 2026: 20 examples worth studying

Imagine a world where every business used the same plain, 12-point Times New Roman font on their signage. Sure, the names might differ, but they’d all blur together, indistinguishable in a sea of sameness.

Now, picture this: one business decides to shake things up. They redesigned their logo with a bold, 40-point red font. Suddenly, when you look down the street, that sign stands out. It grabs your attention.

That’s the power of a logo.

Logos communicate your brand’s personality and make your business memorable. Basically, it's your brand’s first impression. It’s not just a symbol—it’s a message.

But even the best logos lose impact over time.

Design trends evolve, markets shift, and what once stood out can start to feel outdated. That’s when companies consider a brand logo refresh.

If you want to see what this looks like in action, check out some great brand identity examples we complied here.

Stick to this article to see top industry examples of brand logo redesigns and get inspired.

Why brands redesign their logos

A logo redesign is rarely an aesthetic decision, even when it's presented as one. It's a signal, and the reason it gets made is almost always that the business has moved and the mark hasn't caught up. Understanding which of those reasons applies to you is what tells you how far the change needs to go.

There are four reasons to change a logo, and a dishonest one.

• The business changed. A merger, a new category, a dropped product line. Dunkin' removing "Donuts", for example.
• The mark stopped working technically. Gradients, drop shadows and fine detail that fall apart at favicon size or in motion.
• The audience changed. The brand is selling to people who read the old brand as dated or as belonging to someone else.
• The brand needs to distance itself from something. Papa John's redesigned after a public leadership crisis, and the timing was the message.
• A new executive wants to leave a mark. This is the dishonest one, and it produces most of the reversals.

The cost of getting this wrong is the recognition you throw away. A mark that customers can identify in a quarter-second took years and a lot of media spend to get there, and a redesign resets some portion of that to zero.

Superside supported Antler's full brand refresh, logo included, across six creative domains in three-and-a-half months. The speed mattered because the company was raising and the old identity no longer matched what it had become.

Logo refresh vs. logo redesign

These two words get used interchangeably and they describe different projects, with different budgets, timelines and risks.

Getting the distinction right at the brief stage saves you from commissioning a revolution when you needed a tune-up.

Here's how they differ in practice.

Most brands that think they need a redesign need a refresh. American Express flattening a radial gradient and adding an "Amex" variant is a refresh, and it solved a real problem without asking anybody to relearn the brand.

The test is simple. If you can state a change in the business that the new mark is announcing, you're redesigning. If you can't, you're refreshing, and you should brief it that way.

How Superside runs a logo redesign

A logo redesign is a small design job wrapped in a very large operational one. The mark takes weeks and the system, the rollout and the years of keeping everything consistent afterwards are where the cost actually sits. That's the part we're built for.

The decision comes before the concepts

We'll tell you when a refresh is the right answer, and we'll tell you when the honest recommendation is to leave the mark alone and spend the budget on the identity around it. That conversation is cheaper than a reversal.

Our branding services cover brand identity systems end to end: logo, typography, iconography, visual frameworks and the guidelines that make them usable.

The context survives the handover

The expensive failure after a redesign is drift. Six months in, three teams are interpreting the new mark differently, and nobody can remember what was decided about clear space or the mono version.

Brand Brain is the system that stops that. It holds your visual rules, specs, past assets and the feedback you've already given as connected knowledge, so a confirmed decision becomes a rule applied to the next brief instead of a question somebody asks again.

The advantage that matters for a rebrand is that the utilization is built in rather than promised, which is exactly the gap Packt had between its 2016 guidelines and how its teams were working.

Everything runs through Superspace, our AI-powered creative management platform, where briefs, reviews and delivery sit alongside that brand context.

The rollout has people behind it

We're your creative team's creative team, staffing from a global bench of more than 500 creatives across 67 countries, over 90% of them AI-certified, who've delivered upwards of 200,000 creative projects for brands including Intuit, DoorDash, Figma and Reddit.

For a rebrand that means one team can take the mark through packaging, presentation design, social templates and video without handing your identity between vendors. You can see the range across our work and the rest of our customer stories.

20 logo redesigns worth studying

These are chosen for what they teach rather than for how recent they are, and several are a decade old because the lesson outlasted the trend.

Each entry gives you what changed and the transferable point. Where a redesign was later reversed or abandoned, we've said so, because those are the most useful entries on the list.

1. Burberry

Dropped the Equestrian Knight and serif wordmark in 2018, reinstated an archive-inspired knight in 2023. The lesson is continuity: a mark with a century of history behind it is not a design asset to be swapped per creative director.

What separates a redesign that works from one that gets reversed

(Source: CreativeBloq)

The clearest way to learn this is from a brand that did both. Burberry ran a full redesign and then undid it, publicly, inside five years, and the criticism that followed names the failure precisely. It's the most instructive recent case in the category.

In 2018 Peter Saville replaced Burberry's Equestrian Knight, which had represented the brand since 1999, with a sans-serif wordmark and an interlocking TB monogram. In February 2023, under Daniel Lee, Burberry reinstated an archive-inspired charging knight and moved back to a serif typeface.

Saville's assessment of the reversal, given to Dezeen in 2025, is worth reading in full if you're about to brief a redesign. He called it "a management mistake", said it "was not wise for an organisation of Burberry's scale to forgo continuity", and noted that "at any point over the last two years, you could have found at least three different Burberry's circulating in the world".

That last point is the one people underestimate. A logo doesn't change on a date, it changes over the years it takes to work through signage, packaging, uniforms, legal filings and stock in transit.

So the pattern behind redesigns that hold:

• Something in the business really changed, and the mark is reporting it rather than decorating a stable situation.
• A recognizable carrier survives. Toys 'R Us kept the backward R. Firefox kept the orange. Mailchimp kept Freddie.
• The rollout is funded as its own project, not treated as an afterthought once the mark is signed off.
• Somebody owns continuity, with authority to say no to a change that only serves a personnel transition.

2. Dunkin' Donuts

Became "Dunkin'", keeping the pink and orange and the 1970s-era typeface while dropping the category word. The lesson is that a name change is the strongest possible justification, and keeping the color did the recognition work.

3. Uber

Replaced an abstract mark that customers couldn't parse with a plain wordmark. The lesson is that abstraction is only affordable once you're already famous, and admitting a miss beats defending it.

4. Weight Watchers

Shortened to WW as the business moved from weight loss into wellness. The lesson is using initials to widen a category without abandoning the name people know.

5. Toys 'R Us

Refreshed for the brand's relaunch, keeping the reversed R and simplifying the palette. The lesson is minimum viable change, holding the single most recognizable element while everything around it modernizes.

6. Mailchimp

Moved to a black-and-yellow system and kept Freddie the monkey while most brands were dropping mascots. The lesson is that following a trend away from your most distinctive asset is how brands become interchangeable.

7. GoDaddy

Dropped its long-running cartoon mascot to focus on the wordmark. The lesson is the counterpoint to Mailchimp: a mascot that contradicts your new positioning is worth losing.

8. American Express

Flattened a radial gradient and introduced an "Amex" variant alongside the full name. The lesson is that adding a short-form mark is often more valuable than changing the primary one.

9. Santander

Inverted its colors, going from white on red to red on white for digital legibility. The lesson is that a technical constraint is the cleanest possible brief, and the change is defensible without a strategy deck.

10. Firefox

Built a family of marks for a family of products, keeping the orange as the constant. The lesson is designing a system rather than a logo when you ship more than one thing.

11. Slack

Rebuilt its hashtag-flower mark in 2019 after the company said plainly it thought the old one was flawed. The lesson is that a technically broken mark, in Slack's case one that fell apart in the wrong color combinations, is a real reason.

12. FC Barcelona

Removed the "FCB" lettering from the crest and cleaned the internal outlines. The lesson is that removal is a redesign, and a crest people know can carry less type than you'd think.

13. The Guardian

Went monochrome, dropping a multi-color masthead. The lesson is that restraint reads as seriousness in categories where credibility is the product.

14. Papa John's

Simplified its wordmark and dropped the possessive apostrophe following a leadership crisis. The lesson is that a redesign can function as distance, and the timing communicates more than the mark.

15. IHOP

Flipped the P to a B for a burger promotion, then reverted within days. The lesson is that a stunt isn't a redesign, and the fact that it worked as publicity is not evidence that identity changes should be temporary.

16. Best Buy

Moved the yellow price tag from around the name to beside it. The lesson is that repositioning an existing element is a refresh with almost no recognition cost.

17. John Lewis

Added "& Partners" to reflect the employee-ownership model. The lesson is that a logo can carry a structural fact about the business, which is a harder thing for a competitor to copy.

18. Century 21

Introduced a "C21" short-form mark alongside a simplified primary. The lesson is that short-form marks earn their keep in app icons and small placements.

19. Rotten Tomatoes

Redrew its icon set so the tomato read as a tomato and shifted to a truer red. The lesson is that illustration quality inside a logo is a legibility issue, not a taste issue.

20. Pepto Bismol

Removed drop shadows, flattened the mark and changed the typeface while holding the pink and yellow. The lesson is that you can modernize almost everything if you keep the color, because color is what people recall first.

What the 20 have in common

Reading these together, the successful ones share less about design than about process. Three patterns hold across almost all of them, and they're the things to check before you commission anything.

• A recognizable carrier survived the change. A color, a letterform, a mascot or a shape stayed put so customers had something to hold on to.
• The change was reporting something true. Where a redesign announced a real shift in the business, it stuck. Where it announced a new executive, it tended not to.
• The system mattered more than the mark. Every one of these needed variants, rules and files before it could be used, and the brands that treated that as the deliverable had smoother rollouts.

The fourth pattern is about what you don't see here. The overwhelming majority of brands that considered a redesign in any given year correctly decided against it, and there's no gallery of those because nothing happened.

How to redesign a logo without losing recognition

The design itself is the short part. Most of a redesign is auditing what exists, deciding what carries over and then getting a new system into thousands of places consistently. These seven steps are the order that keeps the recognition risk manageable.

1. Audit where the mark appears

Before anything gets drawn, list every surface the logo lives on. Product, app icon, packaging, signage, invoices, email templates, vehicle livery, partner co-branding.

This list is what turns an abstract project into a scoped one, and it's usually longer than anyone expects. It also tells you which technical constraints are real.

2. Decide what must survive

Name the one or two elements customers use to identify you, then protect them. That might be a color, a shape, a mascot or a single letterform.

A redesign that changes everything at once has no bridge back to the brand people already know. Deciding the carrier before concepting is what stops that happening by accident.

3. Set constraints, not adjectives

Briefs full of words like "modern" and "bold" produce rounds. Briefs with constraints produce work.

Give the minimum legible size, the single-color requirement, the motion behavior, the co-branding lockup rules and the languages the wordmark has to render in.

4. Concept in the extremes, then converge

Ask for a refresh-level option and a full-redesign option side by side, even if you think you know which you want. Seeing both against your own audit is the fastest way to settle the refresh vs. redesign question with evidence rather than opinion.

5. Test against confusion, not preference

Preference testing tells you what a small group likes this week. Confusion testing tells you whether people still recognize you, which is the thing you're risking.

Show the candidate marks at realistic size and duration alongside competitor logos, and measure misidentification.

6. Build the system, not the logo

A logo on its own is unusable at scale. What teams need is the lockup variants, the clear-space rules, the color and mono versions, the file formats, the motion spec and the do-not list.

Superside's work with Packt is really a story about this step. Packt's guidelines dated back to 2016 and 2017, so every team was interpreting the brand differently, and rebuilding the system took design iterations down from 10 to 20 rounds to minor tweaks on first drafts.

7. Plan the rollout and the announcement separately

Decide in advance whether the new mark arrives with a statement or simply appears. Both work, and the failure mode is announcing loudly and then taking two years to finish the changeover.

OPA! moved fast enough to avoid that problem, completing its brand transformation in one month with three times its previous creative output and a 5 out of 5 satisfaction score.

Can AI redesign your logo?

This is now one of the most-asked questions on the topic, and the honest answer has two halves. AI is genuinely useful across parts of a redesign and poorly suited to the part everyone wants it for.

Where AI can help is volume and exploration. Generating a wide field of directions quickly, producing the mono and lockup variants once a mark is settled, mocking the candidate up across hundreds of surfaces, and building the motion and resizing variants that make a system usable.

Where it struggles is the decision itself. A generated mark has no view on which element of your existing brand carries recognition, because it doesn't know what your customers respond to.

It also can't tell you not to redesign, which is frequently the correct answer. We've reviewed the current crop in our roundup of AI logo generators, and the pattern holds: fast at output, unreliable at judgment.

There's a practical risk too. Generated marks tend toward the statistical middle of what already exists, which is the opposite of what a logo is for, and distinctiveness is hard to verify after the fact.

Is it time to redesign your logo?

There's no age at which a logo expires.

What you're looking for is a gap between what the brand says and what the company is, or a technical failure you can demonstrate.

Work through these five and count the yeses:

• The mark breaks somewhere you need it to work. Test it at 16 pixels, in a single color, embroidered, and as a 3-second animation. Failures here are objective and worth fixing.
• You've changed category, name or business model. Weight Watchers becoming WW is a yes. Adding a product line isn't.
• Your own team won't use it correctly. When designers keep making unofficial variants, the mark is fighting the work it has to do.
• Customers misread it. Not "it feels dated to me" but evidence that people can't tell what it is or confuse it with a competitor.
• The identity around it has already moved on. If the palette, typography and photography have all shifted, the logo is now the odd one out.

One yes means a refresh. Three or more means you're probably looking at a redesign.

Worth noting that internal pressure to redesign tends to peak exactly when teams have the least capacity to handle the rollout. Superside's Breakpoint report found 86% of teams are at or beyond capacity, and a logo change is one of the few projects that creates work in every other function at once.

And if you want a second opinion before you commit, book a call with us and we'll look at what you've got. We'd rather talk you out of a redesign you don't need than sell you one you'll reverse. For more on the craft side, our guides to logo design tips, corporate logo design and building a brand identity go deeper.

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