New Calendly logo

Image credit: Calendly/Smith & Diction

Calendly has unveiled a new logo and visual identity and from a graphic design point of view, I think the Calendly rebrand is a big improvement.

The previous Calendly brand identity was perfectly functional: clean, professional and certainly recognisable, but perhaps lacking a little personality and compared to the new version it looks dated. It also had one slightly unfortunate problem, once someone pointed out that the logo looked like a toilet seat, it was quite difficult to unsee it.

Image credit: Calendly/Smith & Diction. Before and after

And plenty of people did see it. When the previous Calendly logo was introduced in 2021, its supposed resemblance to a toilet seat became something of a talking point online.

Not necessarily the kind of brand recognition you’re looking for!

The new Calendly identity feels much more confident, with bolder typography, a softer but more distinctive colour palette and a stronger collection of graphic elements. More importantly, everything feels as though it belongs together.

Image credit: Calendly/Smith & Diction

The new Calendly logo is only part of the rebrand

It’s very easy to judge any rebrand by simply putting the old logo next to the new one and asking which is better, but that misses a large part of what good brand identity design is about.

A strong visual identity needs to work across a website, social media, presentations, advertising, print, signage and countless other applications. The logo might be at the centre of it, but it needs a visual system around it, and that’s where I think the new Calendly brand identity is considerably stronger.

Image credit: Calendly/Smith & Diction. Some of the logo options

The new typography, colours and supporting graphic elements give Calendly far more scope to create communications that are recognisably theirs without having to make the logo enormous and stick it in the corner of everything.

That’s the sign of a much more developed visual identity.

Looking more closely at the Calendly logo

There are, however, a few details in the new Calendly logo that I’m not sure about.

Initially, I thought the ‘a’ and ‘e’ looked as though they were sitting at slightly strange angles, but when you look more closely at how those characters join into the following letters, the reasoning starts to make more sense.

Image credit: Calendly/Smith & Diction

There’s a direction and movement running through the lettering, with those angled elements following a similar path as they connect visually with the next character.

It’s a clever piece of logo design when you understand what’s happening, but I suspect 99% of people looking at the logo will never realise why it has been done.

Which raises an interesting design question: if a clever idea is so subtle that virtually nobody understands it, is it actually helping the design?

As a designer, I can appreciate the thinking once I’ve studied it, but I wonder whether the idea is just a little too obscure to be fully appreciated by the people the identity is actually intended for.

Then there’s the ‘y’, which for me just looks slightly odd. It almost feels as though it has come from a different typeface. There may well be a deliberate reason behind it, but visually I don’t think it sits quite right alongside the other characters.

These are relatively small criticisms, though, particularly when you look at the rebrand as a whole.

Why the Calendly rebrand works

Taken as an entire visual identity rather than simply a new logo, I think the Calendly rebrand is much stronger than what it replaces.

It has more personality and confidence, but importantly it also gives Calendly more visual tools with which to build recognition. The logo, typography, colour palette and supporting graphic elements now feel like parts of the same system rather than individual pieces.

Image credit: Calendly/Smith & Diction

I particularly like the way the identity uses symmetrical shapes and imagery throughout. Individually the elements are very simple, but the way they’re combined, cropped and positioned creates much more unusual and distinctive shapes.

And that’s the part of rebranding that can sometimes get overlooked.

A logo is important – very important, but a logo on its own isn’t a brand. It’s the consistent use of the logo, typography, colour, imagery and graphic elements that creates something people begin to recognise.

That recognition creates familiarity, familiarity builds confidence and, ultimately, confidence helps create trust.

The new Calendly logo isn’t perfect (although is a logo ever?) and there are certainly details in the wordmark I would question, but when you look at the complete Calendly brand identity rather than judging the logo in isolation, I think it’s a big improvement.

Calendly brand identity designed by Smith & Diction. Image source: Calendly / Smith & Diction. Reproduced for criticism and review.