Gk
BackMyBook has outgrown its brand. Truth be told, we never really loved the BackMyBook brand to begin with. It was always kind of the last thing left on the whiteboard when we had to wrap up the branding process and just get something out. In retrospect, settling was probably a mistake, but it did the job in terms of getting us out there quickly.
Folks have been asking me, 'What's so wrong with BackMyBook'? Well, two reasons, really. First, as a brand 'BackMyBook' is bland. It has no personality, no poetry, no aspiration. It just doesn't breathe. We tried to nuance it a bit with the friendly ascii-art logo, but there's only so much you can do with a literal phrase like 'BackMyBook'.
Secondly, the product itself has painfully outgrown the brand. BackMyBook started out as a simple content showcase platform with some simple social features. It has since grown into a full-featured web-publishing community-building, content-marketing, newsletter-blasting, e-commerce-selling behemoth, and it just doesn't make sense to continue to constrain it to the tiny confines of 'BackMyBook'. So,we need a brand that can carry the weight of the product, and potentially carry it for many more markets and media than simply books.
Somewhere along the way, we came into the domain affabl.com. We immediately loved the term 'Affable' and felt like we could live without the trailing 'e' (we're totally web 2.0 like that). The process of actually physically rolling out the rebrand is a fairly long and painful one, so Affabl won't be appearing overnight. But, I'm really excited about taking our product to the next level.
I also really love the new logo. We wanted to maintain some continuity with the ascii-art theme of the BackMyBook logo, while making it... Affabl. We also wanted to convey the sense of transformation, both literally because our brand is changing and because the product itself transforms what is possible for artists to acheive online. Anyway, here's the old logo, and the new:
So what do you think of the new brand?
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