Guinness modernized its logo by swapping one letter for its harp

Your brand has years of recognition baked in. A refresh can build on that or burn it. This week gave us both versions, side by side. Let me catch you up.

The deep cut

• Modernize by extending, not replacing. Guinness swapped one letter for its harp instead of drawing a new mark.
• Hide the connection in the details. Form put British Cycling and Lloyds into the typography, not a lockup.
• Test the refresh before you ship it. Mozilla dialed back Nova after users complained about wasted space.

The letter that was already there

Guinness ran its new LoVely campaign without touching its logo. The team took the word "Lovely," swapped the "v" for the harp that has sat on the bottle for 160 years, and used it everywhere. The harp's shape already looked like a "v," so nothing had to be forced.

The lesson for a heritage brand is restraint. As global creative director George Hackforth-Jones put it, "Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of you." Guinness didn't need a new symbol. It found a new job for the one it had.

The same move worked in Helsinki. Hasan & Partners built The Train Factory's identity from an old safety mark that once told engineers where to lift a carriage. They shaped it into a "T." Everything else, from the palette to the type, came from the building. "Everything else came from the building," the studio said.

Hiding the partnership in the letterforms

Every sponsored event hits the same wall. Two logos land on your desk, and someone asks you to make theirs bigger. British Cycling and its sponsor Lloyds had that exact problem.

Form skipped the fight. Instead of solving it in the logo lockup, they solved it in the typography, where nobody looks. They started with Anton, already part of the British Cycling brand, then reshaped letters to pull from Vic, the cycling symbol, and the curves of the Lloyds horse.

"So even in the typography, you have got this subtle connection between the two brands," said creative director Alex Andlaw. Both brands live in the letters, so nobody argues about badge size.

When recognition does the reading for you

Instagram redrew its wordmark for the first time in a decade. The problem: people keep reading it as "Instagzam." The exaggerated "r" looks like a "z," and once you see it, you can't stop.

Here's why Instagram gets away with it. Put the wordmark inside a familiar app, wrap it in the gradient, and your brain fixes the typography on its own. Billions of users already know what it says. Your team's new product does not. Give an unknown company ambiguous lettering and people will get the name wrong, which stings after a $40,000 identity bill.

Personality is worth protecting. Instagram could have picked a clean geometric sans and looked like the rest of tech. It chose character instead. The catch is that character only reads as character when recognition is already carrying the load.

Ship it, then listen

Mozilla nearly overcorrected. Early versions of Project Nova had floating toolbars, heavy rounding, and pastel gradients, the same look every SaaS dashboard has worn since 2024. Firefox risked modernizing itself straight into sameness.

Then the community pushed back on wasted screen space and endless rounded corners. Mozilla restored Compact Mode and added controls over interface roundness. Not glamorous, just good UX. The stronger part of Nova is the shared tokens and components underneath, so new features feel built in rather than bolted on. That matters more than whether the tabs are 8px or 14px round.

Three questions for your team

• What asset do we already own that could carry the refresh, the way Guinness used its harp, before we brief a new mark?
• If we changed our wordmark tomorrow, would recognition cover a weak letter, or are we betting on brand equity Instagram has and we don't?
• Are we shipping this refresh to users for feedback first, or telling them to get used to it the way Mozilla almost did?