Which logo is better? Old or new, science has the answer

Change is sometimes controversial, but they happen for a reason. When a company decides to go and change its logo, opinions arise. But according to science, which one is better: the old or the new logo? To find out, a group of researchers commissioned by Business Insider used a system that analyzes the pathways that the human eye follows when looking at them.

The heatmaps created with the Dragonfly app reveal that, for example, Instagram’s logo change is not the failure that some media called it. In fact, it receives more attention from our eyes (or at least the subjects’) than the previous one. It turns out it produces 10% more engagement with users, which is quite an interesting fact.

Other logos studied are, for example, Google’s. It was found that the previous logo made users focus more in the center of it, due to the letter g’s loop. Absent in the new version, it has a negative impact on user engagement.

Paypal is another company that perhaps shouldn’t have changed logos. Its saliency considerably dropped, so maybe it should be taken into account when approaching another redesign.

You can read more about the conclusions here, and compare each well-known brand’s new and old logotypes. Which are your favorites? 🙂