This is not going to be the most polite response, coming as it is from a somewhat visceral reaction, but I HATE it!
At first I thought the favicon in my browser was just a logo for some publishing site I didn’t remember navigating to. The S just looks slouched and way too relaxed. Lazy, even. Color is… fine? Though it struck me as more leather-bound book than brick red if they are trying to go for the whole “building blocks” theme. Again, the kind of color palate I’d associate with a publisher, maybe a money manager, more so than anything remotely modern.
Worse yet, I see syncro has gone down the path of a boring word mark only logo that makes it look indistinguishable from every other tech company who did the same thing in the past 5-7 years. UGH! Boring! I am particularly peevish about the choice to use a font that has disconnected and disjointed letter forms… this visually communicates the exact OPPOSITE of what syncro is supposed to be - a platform that ties lots of things together! The octopus was a perfect representation how many of us MSP owners/consultants/account managers/customer service specialists/technical specialists/HR managers/CIO/CFO/CEOs have to have all our arms coordinated and working together.
I was told in chat that “Eight, our former octopus mascot was released back into the ocean to earn some nice rest.” and after they JUST did a beautiful redesign and put Eight on the newest app as well! COME BACK, EIGHT! WE STILL HAVE WORK TO DO, SYSTEMS TO MONITOR, TICKETS TO CLOSE, INVOICES TO PROCESS!
Hudu did a rebrand recently and went from a script to a sanserif font, a slightly different shade of purple and replaced the magic wand with a rabbit head - at least they kept a sense of thematic continuity. Atera ditched it’s funky space scape theme and green color in favor of hot-pink, but turned a triangle in a square into triangles within triangles and made the word mark even more stylized and echoing their old retro-modern space theme.
Syncro, on the other hand, decided to just flip over the pieces, board, and table. Aside from the uninspired font-choice-as-brand-identity move, the whole site wide change looks like someone prompted DALL-E with “show me paintings from Magritte’s iron oxide period.” Is this REALLY the impression you want to communicate either to your customers or your customers’ customers?
I’m sure we all have had enough surreal unreality to deal with in the world that they don’t have to push it in our faces! Lots of indie games I can go play if that’s what I’m looking for.
I realize they probably paid a lot of money for this to some outside marketing agency, but someone on the executive team just needs to hit the Undo arrow on the whole thing. No sense in continuing to throw good money after bad in trying to make this look better. And it’s going to look a LOT worse as time goes on and the novelty fades. Moreover, this branding exercise squanders years of previous investment in brand building since it does not tie in AT ALL with the company brand evolution over time.
Hopefully Syncro will NOT aspire to be like Microsoft and be constantly confusing their brands in the marketplace by changing names, colors, icons, or even entire control sets to random parts of the platform just to then move them back later in the name of giving the marketing department something to do to. But even Microsoft is still represented by a Window! Can you imagine if Apple ditched the apple logo? Even P&G got their moon back - satanic panic be damned!
ICONIC BRANDS HAVE ICONS!
I see some responses that seem to be conflating the good directions they are going with UI/UX design in the tools we interact with every day with the branding changes. These are two different things. Indeed, even the preview (and current) system still uses the original color palate. Heck, if they wanted give us the ability to select color palates that are more in line with our own branding for end-user-portal purposes that would be welcome, but it doesn’t have to be tied their brand identity. Syncro can be plain, but functional on the backend regardless of whether they want to identify themselves to the customer on their web site with either ocean blue or s**t brown.
Just my $.02. Had to get it off my chest. Back to work.
KW