Amex released a slightly modified logo and numerous other branding tweaks as part of a new marketing platform. The most basic changes are a stronger blue in the American Express logo and a new tagline, ‘Don’t live life without it’ and ‘Don’t do business without it.’ (Press Release)Â These changes can be viewed on the American Express website.
Another interesting change (which I haven’t yet seen in the real world) is that the American Express will begin showing up as AMEX on small icons where the full text is hard to see. I personally think the way they did it is awful and weird, yet others think it’s a brilliant piece of design (shrugs):
They’ve also refined the centurion figure pictured on the center of some Amex cards:
It’s funny how the marketing company put the Amex Platinum card details onto the Blue Cash card marketing, let’s hope this shows up in real life 😉 :
The marketing work was done by the Pentagram design firm, you can read their detailing of the changes here.Â
It’s incredibly fascinating to read the dozens of comments to this Underconsideration blogpost which is apparently a blog dedicated to studying branding changes. Just shows how each niche has many people who find the nuances of that subject important and worth serious discussion, no different than we would discuss a minor change in card benefits and the like.
Hat tip to u/croqcall on Reddit
The R is different in the logo too. I like the changes
Knowing corporate culture, the stakeholders involved in the re-design probably spent more than a total of 1000 hours discussing the changes.
Did they increase the text FONT size on the back of card, so us over 40 with decreasing close-up vision can READ the text?
Did they stop putting the 4 digit CVV code on front on top of a color/background which is hard to read? Anything more user-friendly?
holy crap dude. i hope they roll the changes back. while everything looks OK to me, I cant stand the chopped off small icon for AMEX. looks so stupid. why is the logo off to the right? like others said, i thot my app was broken or my browser needed its cookies cleaned. so dumb. branding company was smoking crak creating that. they obv didnt test their ideas in real life first.
I’m a software engineer, but I follow design and branding principles as a hobby.
I think it’s an example of the rebranding done right. These changes are very subtle. They improve the logo to go with the new times, but at the same time, they still aren’t noticeable enough to the untrained eye. This is something that a lot of folks outside of professional branding never appreciate, which results in ridiculous rebranding attempts at so many big companies.
So, it’s very impressive to see an example where things were actually done properly.
Reminds me of the Windows Phone UX..
my appl *swipe right to read the rest* ications
Seriously dumb.
Ambivalent about the refinement of the centurion…but I like the old blue more. Something old school and classic about it.
The real change I hope for is that they make some positive changes to the Amex Gold card…For folks like me whose spending doesn’t quite justify the Chase Sapphire Reserve or the Amex Platinum, they face some competition from the Uber card right now. Honestly, I was gonna keep the Amex Gold until the Uber card came out (the discount offers the former has are good for me and added to the airline incidental credit would offset the annual fee)…Now I’m gonna wait to see if they make any positive changes by the time the annual fee comes up and ask about a retention offer.
I like the little white sideways house in the “EX.”
They should have an image of a RAT as a logo.
Food for thought AmEX
hahaha
good one
I can’t believe people get paid to do this.
They didn’t change the things which actually needed changing e.g. their stupid card numbering and flimsy transparent plastic cards which are hard to read.
As someone with 2 amex cards that have the same last 5 digits, yeah the numbering is not ideal.
I have the ED card and yeah once the silver letter covering is rubbed off it’s difficult. They really should make the background white or silver not see through.