American express logo American Express has a new logo, but it probably slipped under your
radar. It’s part of a complete brand redesign led by Pentagram partner Abbott Miller. The credit card company has swapped out its blue box with a gradient for . . . a blue box without a gradient.
“We didn’t want people to say, Oh, did you see that new logo [ugh],” says Miller. “It was more
if you cleaned the smudges off your lenses. It’s cleaner. Clearer.”
In fact, it’s a lot more than that.While Pentagram’s work doesn’t look significant at a glance,
when you actually analyze the logo itself, you can see that the firm has subtly reengineered the
word mark to break American Express out of its own blue box. “I felt like the old blue box was
sort of like a punctuation mark in their communications, from an older sensibility about being
low-key about the branding,” says Miller. “What we’ve given them are tools to make their voice more assertive.”
To do so, Pentagram redrew “American Express” itself. In the last version of the logo, used
since 1975, the letters themselves were outlined with no true negative space of their own. Functionally speaking, the glyphs butted up to one another oddly, and that meant if you
pulled them out of the box or removed the outline, the lettering fell apart. The redrawn version
can live anywhere as type alone, making for a bold statement on a letterhead. After the redraw,
the letters also scale with more fidelity, too, meaning they’re better equipped for billboards.At
the same time, in the age of smartphones and apps, branding needs to easily shrink, too. The
old blue box didn’t work at smaller scales–like online checkout, where the user has to select
their credit card from several minuscule logos. “You line up Visa, Mastercard, and then you
have this AMERICAN EXPRESS that’s illegible,” laughs Miller. “So you know, that must be
AmEx!”
For moments like this one, Pentagram created a second version of the blue logo that simply
reads “AmEx” over two lines. That’s a practical savings of 11 letters, which is crucial at the
pixel level, and allows the logo to be legible even when presented in tiny sizes.
Having a secondary logo also comes with a bonus: If American Express decides to lean in to
its abbreviated, colloquial name as its primary brand, the pieces are already laid for the visual identity to back it up. American Express literally has two logos for two potential futures.“It’s interesting, a lot of the research we were looking at with that, across all categories, people traditionally–more mature consumers, as well as millennials–everyone, really, prefers the
words ‘American Express.’ The full words. Not ‘Amex,’” says Miller. “[But] you know, there’s
a kernel of future evolution [for the brand]. No one is ready to commit to that yet, but as you
see it, and gain familiarity with it, it may be suggestive of a contraction with a future life that
is more poignant.”