Branding FedEx Kinko’s

Written by David Wertheimer on May 12, 2004

FedEx unveiled a new logo for Kinko’s recently, a bold move toward corporate brand integration. The new logo, designed by Landor, tries mightily to integrate two disparate commercial images. Kinko’s old logo didn’t have enough structural similarity to its new parent’s identity, so FedEx had to start fresh.

Several noteworthy touchstones can be found in the graphic element. The use of existing FedEx colors for the new icon nicely ties the parent company’s numerous services into Kinko’s visual presence. The light blue continues the FedEx trend of introducing muted secondary tones to complement its trademark purple. Most importantly, the star contains in it a right-facing purple triangle–a delightful nod to the allusive arrow in the original FedEx logo.

Simplifying the word “Kinko’s” to a thin sans-serif font is FedEx’s way of maintaining the brand name without encroaching on the master identity. Putting “Kinko’s” in the FedEx font would detract from the main logo, while keeping the original would not mesh as smoothly. FedEx clearly wants people to associate Kinko’s stores with FedEx, but it wants to maintain the brand equity of the chain it bought. Yahoo! performed a similar logo revision when it pulled Hotjobs into its master brand (see before and after).

The new FedEx Kinko’s logo is not without critique. There is no apparent justification for the use of a sans-serif font for the additional text while the text add-ons to other FedEx logos (Freight, Ground, and so forth) use a serif one. Perhaps the old font can’t sit full-size next to the master brand, but the continuity is lost. The light blue in the icon represents one equal portion of FedEx as a whole, but it doesn’t seem to play a strong-enough role in defining the image as Kinko’s. And the asterisk (is that what it’s supposed to be?) doesn’t ring true as iconography: no other FedEx logo has a dingbat to call its own, so why does Kinko’s?

Still, the design succeeds far more than it fails. A quote from the FedEx brand FAQ sums up the initiative (paraphrased):

The icon represents the collection of the three kinds of FedEx services available at these locations–orange for global express shipping, green for ground shipping, and blue for the new retail business service centers. At the heart of the icon is purple, which is shared by all FedEx companies.”

Without a doubt, the new logo serves its purpose, and serves it well.

See also: New UPS Logo

20 Comments

  1. me says:

    it looks like a microsoft product with a touch of HP.

  2. Hrant says:

    I don’t know about all the post-rationalization, but I actually like the asterisk.

    hhp

  3. I find the logo to be far too busy for my tastes. I think the “Kinko’s” should have been placed into a much thinner version of the FedEx font. Using Helvetica here, especially a size that is ever so slightly shorter than the FedEx type, creates awkward spacing as the two words are mashed together. The letterforms are also overly out of proportion with each other.

    Completely agree on the tagline. Should have followed more closely to other FedEx variants, using the same serif font and placement starting under the “E” in FedEx.

    Finally, to reduce complexity, it seems the dingbat could have been used as areplacement for the apostrophe in “Kinko’s”. This would both simplify the visual clutter, and allowed the “Kinko’s” to stand on its own if FedEx ever wanted to do that.

    The logo fails more than it succeeds in my opinion. Just much too much going on. It already smacks of the same kinds of problems Intel and Microsoft have with logos that are out of control visually.

  4. Altman says:

    Why FedEx would wish to muddy their own name by associating it with the lowly reputation of their new aquisition is a bit interesting. Without a wholesale change in the structure of the business, this could only serve to devalue the FedEx name.

    The stark contrast between typeface weights makes these two companies look like, well, two separate companies with their logos side by side. I wonder if FedEx did this specifically because it is aware of Kinko’s poor reputation, and plans to drop the Kinko’s name in the future? Aside from the typeface, the Kinko’s portion of the logo does not resemble the FedEx logo.

    I, too, do like the asterisk though. That said, I have no idea what relevance an asterisk has to Kinko’s, nor why I should associate the two.

  5. ben says:

    I’d assumed the asterisk was a combination of an orange arrow (for FedEx) and a blue/green K (for Kinko’s).

    Ignoring what it may look like, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for this to be the only corporate branch (pardon the pun) with it’s own dingbat. Isn’t the distinction between shipping and copying greater than the difference between ground and express?

  6. John Morse says:

    The asterisk thing looks like a great way to signpost a Kinko’s location on a street. Photo (from “Foreward”)

  7. Matt says:

    I just can’t see how they could have made “FedEx Kinko’s” work much better than this. To customers, “FedEx’ is a way of shipping. The logos work well for FedEx Ground, FedEx Express, FedEx Freight, but not for a copy shop. No one’s going to say “I’m going to FedEx to FedEx this.”

    That’s why, in the great American tradition of second-guessing, I think it should have been “Kinko’s by FedEx.” They could even have used the asterisk, which I also like.

  8. Eben Sorkin says:

    The New design is a typical hodgepodge you get from design by committee. This is the kind of thing that happens just before somebody wise’s up & sort’s out a clear identity.

    Altman may be right – this could be a holding position while they decide what to do.

    Somehow it reminds me of the microsoft identity before they sorted themselves out into a proper system.

    ‘without a doubt’ is laughable description of this Landor monster. It remains to be seen how this will be seen by the public.

  9. b.king says:

    Say what you will. It’s still better than UPS’s update.

    Not discussed at all, though is the VERY nice interaction between the “K” and the counterform arrow in the “Ex.”
    I wish that had been played up more.

  10. nick shinn says:

    Strange mis-match of typefaces: grotesque with geometric
    The grotesque has a smaller cap height than Futura — doesn’t look right.
    HP is using Futura as its corporate face.

  11. Altman says:

    You’re right Nick. Upon my initial glance, I had thought they were similar, but it is indeed a mismatch. That furthers my point that they look like two separate company logos side by side. The more I look at this logo, the more, um, wrong it looks.

  12. Jesse B. says:

    Since the original Kinko’s began near a mid-’70s UC Santa Barbara, I’m going to miss the 70’s-esque use of Revue for the logotype. I guess the new logo is an improvement, if not for the odd amalgamation of a name.

  13. Yorkali says:

    Gross Hodgepodge
    I too find the redesign a bad juxtaposition of disparate elements. It just shows how much the Kinkos/Fedex marriage is not a union of equals. I can just imagine the stormy board meetings right now that led us to this weird “FrankenLogo”. Anyway, the good points. The asterix is genius, I think that should become core of the new identity once this triste with the aforementioned design ends.

  14. Bryan says:

    I think the logo overall needs to bigger. And it needs more colors. And can we have a tagline or a theme song? What about some brackets or something around the asterisk to say ” hey, we put ideas and stuff into boxes and mail it”.

    Back to square one, I think. This is crizap.

  15. Jordan says:

    It seems very much imbalanced, with the gigantic asterisk flying off into the sky.

  16. Amran says:

    I think the logo looks ok. I look at it differently. By looking at the logo, I know that there are 2 company ie, FedEx and Kinko’s and that FedEx is the parent company of Kinko’s due to the importants place of FedEx than Kinko’s (higher and bold).

    The asterix is a good idea but I think they should drop Office and Print Center or if they need to have that, make the font much smaller. To me, Office and Print Center is just an info and not part of the logo, so they should not have a degree of presents at all……

    just my opinion.

  17. Johnny says:

    I very much like the asterix used for the logo.
    Maybe it would have worked better if the “Kinko’s” was underneath “FedEx” like all other sub-companies of FedEx.

    Living in Australia, I’d like to see how from no FedEx drop-off locations in the CBD, all 7 Kinko’s in the Sydney CBD change to FedEx Kinko’s. That logo certainly is a freshen up as the old logo looked more like gumby type font. Anyways this is exciting stuff!

  18. kev says:

    Ain’t no way that’s Helvetica, look at the k. (k’s, I guess.)

    Anyway, I’ll be anxious to see how this rebranding is handled, since I work at Kinko’s and apparently it’s all supposed to be done by november. So far all I’ve got is a crappy purple apron.

  19. Tim Holdriss says:

    It’s a horse designed by committee alright, and no one in the committee wants to take credit for the resulting camel. The name has no possible direction for future growth, and I’d expect the name to change in about 5 years, or by the time that FedEx can dislodge any remaining Kinko’s senior management.

  20. Tim Holdriss says:

    …another thing… following the appallingly bad design and concept work coming out of American colleges these days, I guess I could only expect this kind of shoddily executed corporate identity from the “geniuses” that today’s advertising agencies breed. B-b-b-bad stuff, people.

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