Once in blue moon I need to order some chemicals from Sigma-Aldrich. I just browsed to their web site and was surprised to find out they changed their logo from a technical, medical look to a funky 60s phsyco-licious look. Did I land on a different kind of chemical web site? the "m"s in the logo (and the custom type across the site) are stretched out of proportion, just because the consonant appears in both words in the logo.
this asynchronous and out of place look gets tenfold worst the smaller the font size, such as in emails and invoices.
Perhaps they wanted a more organic look as they appear to be getting involved into biotechnology. but I call it a failure of disco-funk proportions.
Thats new logo gives a really amateur impression for a company that I’d expect to carry a serious tone. It also says ‘Merck’ for the Australia site, any idea what that is?
I jumped on their website and they are using it for headline text as well. The product, service and industries tabs are images instead of text as well, which is why they look slightly blurry. What a disaster of a page!
The audience for logo the is someone in the life sciences, not design. My wild-ass guess is the M represents a protein/lipid/nucleic acid structure. But I’m not in the life sciences. Are you?
Now considering research labs are black counters and white walls, some of the most boring places on earth, it is not surprising a vendor to such a world would want to project the opposite.
Now if you want to rip on a logo and web page, I’d start closer to home. coughcoughcore77coughcough. Just sayin.
Why for the love of god have I been looking at the same students in the header picture for the last 15 years? I do have my own Where’s Waldo with it though. Can you find the 3 smokers?
While I applaud them for going beyond the typical bad typeface these kinds of brands typically use, they seem to have gone more Nickelodeon than Nickelodeon. It works better in short applications like the parent brand, Merk. Likely it was designed for that first and then maybe extended out along a range of acquired brands. It gets a bit more challenging with longer brands. It might have helped if they designed a second sentence case “m”. Since this was Merk I’d guess it isn’t the CEOs nephew, likely this was an expensive rebrand. I’ll have to do some digging to see if we can find anything. This would be a pretty big case study for a branding agency.
I think the rebrand overall works well based on what you posted iab. I just think they are overusing the typeface that was designed for the logo. It isn’t readable enough to use for heads and subheads and it takes away from the power of the logo itself. Using a cleaner, more neutral fonts for subs and subheads would have made the logo pop and be more memorable.
I always like to think of similar feeling logos when evaluating a logo. This does feel fun and amateurish. Maybe a friendly skateboard/snowboard brand? Kid’s TV? I would never trust injecting myself with this logo on the needle though…
You will never have to. They aren’t in that market.
I did a structural packaging job for a company called Promega about 20 years ago while they were in the midst of redoing their corporate ID. Same market as Millipore Sigma. Many of the concepts I saw for Promega were on the same lines of Millipore Sigma and I integrated some of them into the structural packaging. The owner of the company was very enthused by them and i was surprised when he chose a more conservative approach.
Also, remember their product is boxes. I think it is an advantage to be able to spot them across the boring lab.
I do agree with yo that they are using their font too much in the headlines. A more restrained use could make it more memorable.
The Core77 logo always reminded me of something skater-themed that you’d find in Hot Topic … not that I could do anything better
This new Merck branding is somewhere between “Wonka PoMo” and “Y2K” styles for me, with maybe some 60s-70s groove. The author of the boards has a ton of different categories for under-appreciated design “movements” that are great to flip through, by the way.
