Some 25 years after launching payments, PayPal is “ushering in a new era for customers” with generic black text. The company has a new logo designed by Pentagram that looks incredibly simple – especially compared to its predecessors with their sleek slant, two shades of blue, and distinctive PayPal P.
They justify this with a variety of reasons, including that the new standalone black wordmark cannot be confused with the rest of the payment processing world – especially not with “the blue that has become synonymous with fintech”.
It's also in the fine tradition of making logos flat just for the sake of making them flatter, and building in weird corporate synergies for no apparent reason. Here, that synergy is actually achieved when PayPal decides to use some colors next to the word PayPal: “Light blue and deep blue overlap to create Venmo blue,” Pentagram writes.
It does Pentagram seems to have put a lot of thought into this and developed a “new bespoke branded font, PayPal Pro,” which is supposedly based on LL Supreme, which in turn is based on Futura.
We also appreciated their use of alliteration: “The colors were calibrated for continuous contrast to create a sense of depth and dimension.”
However, the advertised PayPal Ps remains: It should be displayed when you pay digitally.
Technically, it looks like PayPal started using the new wordmark earlier this month, but it says the official launch will come with the new PayPal debit card — and a new ad campaign featuring Will Ferrell, which you can watch below.