What was the once known, and not so loved, delivery carrier Hermes, now greets people’s front doors, back porches and mailboxes as EVRI, the new Hermes (from 18th March 2022). Usually, a re-brand from a delivery service would have gone under the radar, however this one has managed to provoke designer’s minds, while giving keen LinkedIn users a reason to rant.
The new overall visual identity has been created by Superunion with help from VCCP for the campaign to accompany the branding, both London based design agencies. The re-brand challenges ‘typical’ design rules, as Superunion worked with Monotype to create 194,481 logos and fonts in one brand identity. The branding and campaign are overwhelmingly typography driven, with the idea that every delivery van (all 5,000 of them) and brand assets, e.g., recipes, website etc, will have a different combination of fonts to make up the logo ‘EVRI’.
This idea is debatable as to whether it’s a good branding move or too much. In terms of marketing for the brand, if they were wanting people to notice and talk about it, I’d say they’ve done a pretty good job. From a design perspective, this may seem alien at first because it hasn’t really been done before…it’s like breaking those conventional rules to graphic design, which I like a lot.
However, in terms of the brand recognisability, if every logo on the delivery vans for example is different from the next, it could become inconsistent and confusing, especially for someone from a non-designer perspective.
The reasoning behind the branding is interesting to look at too. The reasoning for combining all 194,481 logos into one brand was to represent “different people, different parcels, different places, different communities”. The brand message is to represent the UK’s diversity, as well as showcasing design and typography trends always changing over time. I think this is a nice and modern way of representing people’s diversities through the art of graphic design.
At first, I was one of those ‘I hate it’ opinions, but after researching the why and how, I actually like it a lot and think it’s a good move from Hermes. Whether it’ll change their reputation of being a poor delivery service or not (which is the rumoured reason as to why they’ve done this whole re-brand) is in the hands of the delivery drivers – let’s hope they stop losing everyone’s parcels now!
