PwC and the...flower?

For this post, I wanted to look at a company which recently redesigned its logo. The obvious choice would have been Gap, which we all know made a drastic mistake and quickly caved to consumer pressure to switch back to the original logo. Another company has decided it was time for a makeover, and it again has mixed reviews.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the Big Four global professional services organizations, renovated the logo to be "better suited to digital and online use." The new design, which was officially rolled out on September 20th, simply contains the lowercase "pwc" and an object which looks like a colorful flower. However, if this logo gets printed in black and white...it turns into a random collection of boxes which makes no sense at all.
So why the switch? Quite frankly, I think the company needed to change to something. It may just be me, but the old font made the logo look like something out of Nightmare Before Christmas. It definitely was not representative of what the company is, and it needed a change. A company like this needs a strong, simple, professional logo. Even if the new logo was simply "pwc," I feel like that would be better than the new flower design or the older one.

I still have not figured out why companies feel the need to tinker with logos, and how they come up with some of these designs. Maybe one day it will make sense, but until then, companies like Gap and PwC will continue to pay designers to come up with these logos which "embody" the brand. Maybe they should take a note from Target, one of the companies which got it right.