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Hey y'all,



As OnePlus grows, so does the number of people it reaches. This presents some challenges. On the one hand, we need to stay true to our brand color and to our loyal users. On the other, we need to better communicate who we are to newer, unfamiliar audiences. In addition, as we expand, we need to make sure that our brand’s image, and the message we’re delivering, is more consistent across all interactions. To cut through the noise of a growingly saturated market, we want everyone, everywhere to have a consistently positive and high-quality experience with OnePlus.



WHY CHANGE A GOOD THING?

Before delving into what has changed and what’s staying the same, we want to take some time to go through the why. Since we started OnePlus in December 2013, our logo and overall visual identity has remained largely untouched. We’ve made some minor adjustments here and there (which many of you may not have even noticed), but this is the most significant revamp of our brand image so far. And why? Well, in part because we felt like it was time to shake things up a bit.



When we first started this project, we wanted to unify our brand across our products, digital channels, offline sales channels, and other touchpoints. True to our Never Settle spirit, after a more thorough analysis, we noticed we needed to take a step further and more broadly revamp our visual identity.



WHAT CHANGES?

In general, people aren’t comfortable with change. So, to avoid a disruptive transition, we started integrating some of the new elements into our past launches. This let us test the waters with some design decisions and also gave us the opportunity to learn how you perceived these changes and iterate based on that feedback.



While the average consumer may not even notice it at first, we’re sure the biggest change for our core users will be the logo. A logo is very important element to a brand. Think of any brand you feel strongly about and its logo will likely be one of the first things that pops into your head. We know that our community loves our logo, so our objective was clear: retain the overall design while solving some of the issues we identified that would make our logo more accessible to more people.



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The changes you see here have two purposes – Create a clearer association between the logo and the brand while improving legibility and visibility. To achieve this, we increased the logo’s thickness, gave the number 1 some curve so it’s more immediately recognizable and slightly increased the plus sign to make it a more relevant part of the logo in homage to our community, which we view as an extension of the OnePlus family. We also removed the solid box behind the word “OnePlus” and made the weight of the entire logo consistent to improve the overall balance.



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The second change that you might notice is our updated Never Settle. Keeping our signature tagline, we changed its style by updating the font, spacing between the letters and swapped the upper case for mixed case.



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This leads us to our third change: a new typeface. Departing from OnePlus Slate, we wanted a highly functional, but versatile typeface – legible for long texts, but also perfect for our logo or headlines. We “test read” a wide range of different typefaces to make sure the letters formed words with the least effort for the user, to assure the best reading experience.



Combining all these elements, we also worked on achieving a more consistent, unique and recognizable brand image. We took our first steps with a bolder look and feel for the OnePlus 7T Series launch, collected invaluable feedback and iterated on what turned out to be a very well-received approach. The result is a better use of our brand colors that conveys a bold yet premium finish, while keeping things fresh and vibrant with new accent colors.



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WHAT STAYS THE SAME?

If what changes is important, keeping what makes us OnePlus is of the essence. Therefore, our creative process started with a careful study of who we are, getting to know our users, and what makes our brand unique.



As mentioned earlier, we’ve retained the classic elements of our refreshed logo: the 1, the + and the surrounding box, as well as the lockup with the icon and “OnePlus”.

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