Technology is supposed to be invisible, they say. It should fade into the background and allow human-friendly design to flourish and delight us. Logitech is embracing that premise wholeheartedly with a major brand redesign being announced today. The company is moving to a bold new color palette, tweaking its logo, and launching a shiny new sub-brand called Logi. Logi is, in the words of Chief Design Officer Alastair Curtis, for "future-facing stuff, it will start to define new categories and new business spaces."

"Design as an ethos and a mentality"

In speaking with The Verge ahead of today's announcement, Curtis set out the vision for a more cohesive company that creates products with "design as an ethos and a mentality." Whereas previously Logitech might have done its design sequentially — meaning the industrial design, packaging, retail experience, and software were all done as separate steps — the new Logitech is going to design "the whole experience" of buying and owning one of its products as one. And if his emphasis on bold colors looks familiar, that will be because Logitech's CDO was the head of design at Nokia before taking up his current post in July of 2013. Over the course of the past two years, he has been putting together a proper design team, staffing up with other former Nokians as well as people with experience at Nike, Samsung, BlackBerry, and other well known brands.

All of this sounds rather ill-defined and marketing-heavy for now, but Logitech says it'll soon start introducing the products that will define its Logi brand and the conceit inherent in dropping the "tech" from the company's full name. Logitech remains the proper company name, and according to Curtis, "whether we as a company completely transition to Logi over the next two or three years is yet to be seen." Also unchanged is Logitech's core business, which consists of making PC peripherals, gaming gear bearing the Logitech G name, and audio equipment under the subsidiary Ultimate Ears brand. The new Logi label will be attached to the company's more experimental and futuristic projects, which Curtis says will include products for the Internet of Things, both "in the home and automotive space."