Ikea has commissioned the design of a fully white and transparent version of its logo, in order to better meet the requirements of online communication and e-commerce. That does not mean the famous yellow and blue logo is dead and buried, however.
Window
The new logo, dubbed Fönster (“window”), retains the font of the original as well as the oval inside of a rectangle, but the letters are now white and the background is transparent. This makes it easy to integrate into any image or video. The oval functions as a sort of “window”, allowing us to see part of the image behind it. The design is future proof and can be used in other, more visually oriented platforms that may still be created.
The new logo means to represent that Ikea is adapting to the age of e-commerce: the company has developed a large amount of experimental apps where augmented and virtual reality serve to help customers shop online, and it is also opening smaller urban stores that function partly or entirely as showrooms, where shoppers mostly order online. Such an urban store was recently opened in the heart of Paris.
Currently, the new logo is mostly meant to be used on social media: instead of putting the logo somewhere up in the corner of an Instagram post, Ikea can now integrate it much more naturally with the content. It could also function as an animation or offer designers a way to add a secondary image within the bigger picture: “You can use it to deliver further information or make people pay attention to a detail,” says Carlo Cavallone, the executive creative director at 72andSunny, the firm that designed the logo. “And then it becomes a way to continue to remind people of the brand in a situation online where we are easily distracted and we encounter millions of images.”
