Please enable Javascript
Skip to main content

The inspiration behind our brand redesign

As a brand, we believe that movement ignites opportunity. We wanted our brand design system to do the same. So when we began our journey toward a redesign, we looked to the world of transportation. Our teams aimed to highlight movement that’s as effortless as tapping a button to request a ride, and to offer options celebrating the endless opportunity movement enables.

Building off our strengths

After more than 1,000 hours of listening to stakeholders worldwide and on-the-ground testing with creative teams, one thing became clear: a truly iconic brand system would leverage the power of our name recognition. We also found an overwhelmingly positive association (88%) of our brand with the color black.

Our global teams, led by Brand Experience, focused on 3 major learnings: 1) Embrace black. 2) Invest in a wordmark, not a symbol. 3) Bring back the U.

Black scored 88% favorability

Uber is a household name

People wondered where the U went

The elements of our brand

Uber’s brand system is made up of 9 elements: logo, composition, typography, iconography, color, motion, photography, illustration, and tone of voice. Here are highlights of each:

Logo

Approachable and easy to read, the logo is instantly recognizable thanks to kerning, refined weight, and defined clear space, plus well-delineated placement in relation to other content.

Investing in the wordmark as the logo

Easily recognizable

Composition

Elegant in its sheer simplicity of use, our composition system creates a subtle U wherever it appears. By defining the grid based on the logo, the system stays flexible and easy to apply.

Typography

The world’s best-used transportation examples led the way to a typeface that maximizes its impact across all applications and languages while staying easy to read, ownable, and highly recognizable. Its name: Uber Move.

Driver Guide

Signage

Iconography

Inspired by global transportation symbols and drawn from the same shapes as our typeface, Uber’s new icons create a seamless system.

Color

A tight color palette, dominated by black and white (whose high contrast makes our text as accessible as possible), draws on the colors used in global navigation. We also employ safety blue sparingly to call out moments of support, assurance, and other important interactions between user and brand.

21:1 contrast ratio

Legibility for everyone

Safety blue in software

In hardware

In packaging

In illustration

Photography

Featuring young and old, local and global, and all our users, photos build on how it feels to move from motivation at point A to the emotional payoff of arriving at point B.

Hero 20%

Lifestyle 50%

Lifestyle with product 10%

Textural 20%

Illustration

Simple shapes, clean lines, limited color, and heightened reality—all inspired by our logo and the language of transportation—give our illustrations a branded feel and make them easy to understand at a glance.

Hyper-efficient

Easy to understand

Inspires through metaphor

Geometric construction

Driver's Guide

Email

Tone of voice

This focuses on the mindset we share with our users: we see the world as it could be and work to make it a reality. Beyond word and style choices, our tone of voice embodies our belief in putting our audience first.

1. Audience-first communication

2. Straightforward and easy to understand

3. Recognizability through consistency

Using what we learned

Built with stakeholder input from around the world and put to the test by our creative teams, Uber’s new brand is simple, flexible, and globally recognizable. It serves our business and engages our audiences. And it helps users move the way they want—and provides a framework for designers to do the same.

Explore the full brand guidelines.