One of the big news items this past week has been the Uber rebrand. As with any big rebrand, especially a brand that seems to have such a polarising effect on people, it stirred strong emotions and quite a lot of unpleasant sneering.
I’m not about to add to that, this isn’t a post about how the icon looks like a bumhole. I’m not here to tear it down or lavish praise on it, I don’t feel qualified to and I’m not privy to the ambitions of Uber, the brief or the specific restrictions of the rebrand.
(Ok, I will say something about it, I think it looks cool).
The interesting thing that stood out to me though, was the derision that was heaped on the CEO for leading the rebrand.
Depending on where you get your news, his involvement goes from being ‘involved’ to being ‘the designer’:
Being Involved
The CEO of Uber is an engineer, businessman and of course a pretty clever bloke. There is no one on earth who understands where Uber is going better than him, and as such is a pretty useful resource for any redesign. I’d argue that any redesign that didn’t intimately involve a CEO in a company like Uber was destined to come up short. Uber is not just private taxi cabs anymore, but food transportation, goods couriers and who knows what else in the future. The only person who knows that future intimately is the CEO, Mike Kalanick.
We can only guess at the dynamic within the design team. Was Kalanick just another senior voice with a special insight or was he an arrogant egotist who no one dared to question? We will likely never know. One thing is for sure, any design team which doesn’t allow free voice to opinions cannot do its best work and the departure of the head of design suggests something was not right within the team.
Being The Designer
Kalanick is not a designer by trade, he’s an engineer. He had to ‘teach himself about kerning’ and learn lots of designy things like colour, balance, harmony etc during the year long odyssey that was the rebrand project. This is where Uber and Kalanick himself have faced a lot of derision. I sense a lot of snobbery here from designers and people who would probably refer to themselves as design aficionados about who is allowed to design things.
I don’t think anyone seriously thinks Kalanick got his hands dirty in Illustrator on this project, maybe a few doodles to convey his ideas and a lot of talking and suggestions.
The fact is, anyone can learn to design, we are all equipped with everything we need to become excellent designers if only we can utilise the mental tools we have properly and be open to learning from experts in the field.
I’m not suggesting you can become a world class designer in a year but designing for something you intricately know better than anyone else, designing for a future only you can truly articulate and surrounded by world class designers with an attitude to learn from them, I think you could be pretty good.
Are we really so insecure about our seat at the table that we need to sneer and tear down others who take an interest in the discipline?
If more CEO’s took the time to learn about design then the craft of design would definitely be elevated in organisations, and designers with it.
Go Mike.
