Change is always difficult, and changing a company logo can be a daunting process. But companies will at some point come to that milestone known as “the rebrand.” For some, it happens early on, once they’ve discovered who they really are. With others, it occurs after many years of having grown (or outgrown) their brand.
For us at iText – yes – it’s definitely been a whirlwind. In the past year and a half only, we've restructured our group of companies and doubled the number of employees. Last year we were selected for Deloitte's Fast 500. We ranked #53 in the EMEA region, place #10 in the Benelux and #3 in Belgium. We opened new offices in the U.S. and in Singapore. Our sales are growing in important business verticals such as government, finance, healthcare and others.
Is our brand following? We had to ask ourselves:
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Has our customer profile changed?
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Does our brand tell the wrong (or outdated) story?
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What do we want to convey? To whom?
We thought it was time.
As the world’s most widely used PDF library, iText is known among millions of developers for its flexibility (open source), superb results (comprehensive, efficient code) and excellent documentation (two iText in Action books and thousands of community posts). We wanted to make sure our new logo still reflected all that and spoke to developers.
We also wanted to appeal to "the suits", or IT and business managers. iText helps solve a variety of document management challenges for today’s enterprises, such as automating processes with workflows, making documents interactive, searchable, secure and archivable for business systems, legally binding with digital signatures, and so on and so forth.
Thirdly, we also help publishers and software makers enhance their products and applications with advanced PDF functionality.
We started with the attached wordmap to help narrow down these notions - "empowering", "dependable" and "innovative" seem to characterize our mission with these three groups.
Based on that brainstorm, the first six proposed logos are shown. Which one of our contenders will go to second round? You will find out in our next blog!
