BY Brand New

House Arrest

Guest Editorial by James Bowie

Redfin, a Seattle-based online real estate service, was content with its little house-in-a-circle logo until Move.com threatened to sue to protect its house-in-a-circle mark. So Hornall Anderson Design Works was enlisted to create Redfin’s new identity, which features, in addition to a stronger wordmark, a more elaborate logo. It shows an aspiring homeowner (clearly a graduate of the Dallas Independent School District) reaching to pluck his ideal house out of the crowded market. And the whole thing looks like a tree!

Move.com’s innovative house-in-a-circle logo

Logo design presents the challenge of creating a symbol that is simultaneously distinctive and simple. The logo must differentiate the company or product it represents while remaining graphically concise and recognizable. The old Redfin logo was generic and unmemorable, particularly in a business awash in house logos, but was able to simply communicate that Redfin would help you buy a house. The new logo is distinctive and won’t attract any lawsuits, but it is also more complex, requiring more decoding on the part of the viewer.

“Redfin” is one of those Internet monikers that is unique but provides no clue about what the business actually does (the name is a play on the word “redefine,” as in what the company hopes to do to the real estate business). With such a mysterious and still relatively unrecognized name, perhaps the company would have been better off sticking with a boring yet clear logo, rather than switching to a clever but potentially puzzling symbol.

James Bowie is a sociologist and researcher at Northern Arizona University. His Ph.D. dissertation examined patterns and trends in trademark design.

\n\nGuest Editorial by James Bowie\n\nRedfin, a Seattle-based online real estate service, was content with its little house-in-a-circle logo until Move.com threatened to sue to protect its house-in-a-circle mark. So Hornall Anderson Design Works was enlisted to create Redfin’s new identity, which features, in addition to a stronger wordmark, a more elaborate logo. It shows an aspiring homeowner (clearly a graduate of the Dallas Independent School District) reaching to pluck his ideal house out of the crowded market. And the whole thing looks like a tree!

Many thanks to our ADV @ UnderConsideration Partners