Revisit

I visited the well designed MailChimp website today and I noticed that the MailChimp logo now sports the big cheesy grin, which made me wonder how many tweeks this logo has seen over the years.  Being a fan of their designs, I took a look online and found some comments from those in the know, namely the designer and the guy who hired him.

Here they are…

1st Generation Logo

I skipped a couple iterations in between there, but the differences are minor and irrelevant. I mainly changed the nose  because whenever I scaled that horrible, horrible Fireworks file, the 2-dot nostrils would often overlap each other, or spread way apart. Also, if I scaled the logo really big, the hat would come apart. You’d literally see a big giant gap between the brim and the gold badge. Like I said, Fireworks is great for web design, but not-so-great for print.

MailChimp 1st Generation Logos

2nd Generation Logo

The comments about MailChimp being “unprofessional” did not bug me one bit. However, I consider myself a scientist, so I love experiments. I’ll try anything just to see what it does for our business.

That’s when we had the idea to remove the monkey altogether, and change our website to look more “corporate and stodgy.”

MailChimp 2nd Generation Logo

3rd Generation Logo

So I emailed Jon. Turns out Jon is really busy, so we had to wait about 6 months.

6 months pass, Jon is finally available, and I show him the Mario diagram. I also show him my sticky note doodle, and I ask him if he can “do what Nintendo did for Mario, except we want the style and detail from the Firefox logo you did, but modernize the chimp a little so it doesn’t look like we’re trying to stay within the 16-bit websafe color palette or something.”

If that were a mathematical equation, it would look something like this:

The MailChimp Logo Design Equation

MailChimp 3rd Generation Logos

So the “try anything” scientific approach definitely seems to be at work here.  As you can see for yourself, the chimp has gone from leaning forward to upright, back to leaning forward. The 2nd iteration here shows the Mario-esque fist. The 3rd iteration takes the smile to full cheese and adds a piece of mail to the hand. Personally, I never understood why the mail wasn’t in the hand in the first place, but in terms of the new smile, I’m undecided, but I’m sure the folks at MailChimp will let us know eventually.

Original References

New MailChimp Logo By Jon Hicks | September 11th, 2008
Thorough write-up about the design process and design history summarized by MailChimp

Recent Work: MailChimp | September 15th, 2008
Personal design blog entry from logo designer Jon Hicks