Uber revealed a new logo Tuesday, replacing its iconic, boxy U with an abstract design of a square inside a circle.
That s what riders will see when they open the app on their phone. Drivers will see a square inside a hexagon. The background color (blue for riders and red for drivers in the U.S.) will vary from country to country, Uber reported, with the ultimate goal being to release new designs for individual cities.
The change created a stir online, with many taking to Twitter to blast the new look as ugly and confusing. Fortune called the logo Bizarre. Mashable compared it to an abstract painting. The Financial Times wrote it suggests arrogance and inconsistency.
The new design is intended to represent the merging of a bit – the smallest unit of data in a computer, measured by a 0 or a 1 – with an atom – the building block of physical matter. The square (a bit) inside the circle symbolizes how Uber s product is part technology and part a physical service, according to the company s news release.
Uber attempts to explain the concept in a video on its website.
The bit represents our technology. It s complex, precise and advanced, but when it is express, it is effortless and refined, a soothing female voice says while music plays in the background. The atom signifies our rapidly expanding cities, the goods we move from place to place, and, most importantly, the people we serve.
Announcing the change on the Uber website, CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick compared the old logo to a bad 1990s haircut.
Have you ever looked at someone s hairstyle and thought oh my, you peaked in the 1990s? Well that s a bit how I feel about Uber s look today. It s not just that we were young and in a hurry when we replaced our red magnet logo with today s black badge four years ago. It s that we were a fundamentally different company.
The company, now valued at $62.5 billion, has expanded from a small black car service to a massive transportation network spanning 400 cities in 68 countries.
Uber started as a big, red U, but scrapped the logo over trademark infringement fears as they planned to go global. For example, Kalanick wrote in 2011, French grocery chain Super U used a similar red U.
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