The KIA logo: a case study of identity crisis
When brands choose to redesign, they do it for a lot of good reasons. For them, it’s a new look, a strategy to enter a new market, appeal to a new target audience, align with a new brand statement etc. But it doesn’t always work that way. We see brands undergo redesigns that eventually become a nightmare. One moment your brand is living the dream — new look, the audience seems to love it, job well done — and the next, it’s the recurring topic of discussion in the design space. Gap faced this dilemma. So did Kraft. The car brand KIA hasn’t been lucky lately.
Sometime in 2021, KIA unveiled their new look in a bid to declare ‘the brand’s future transformation’. However, the new brand icon for change and innovation has become one for puzzlement and criticism over the past weeks.
I’ve always been a fan of KIA growing up and so when I initially came across the rebrand last year, I thought it was a clever approach and didn’t find any problem with it until recently when conversations started to pop on my timeline. Now I clearly see how much it reads KN instead of what was intended: KIA, especially in real life applications. Indeed a case of identity crisis as a result of illegibility. And it doesn’t seem to look good for business.
I’ve seen a couple of proposed solutions to what could be done to remedy this issue of mistaken identity; like introducing a bar in the ‘A’ or a tittle to make the ‘I’ prominent or even adding serifs to the letters. As these could be possible ways of eliminating the issue of illegibility, they create a new problem: upsetting the already existing ‘symmetry’ and ‘rhythm’.
Analyzing further, I discovered a direct and simpler solution that wasn’t being spoken about in the discussions surrounding the conflicted KIA logo. And this for me is a much preferred approach: kerning.
Though the original KIA logo was made to resemble a handwritten signature which flows as an unbroken line, I believe the best approach would be introducing breaks at the joints and then creating a bit of spacing between the letters through kerning. Doing this will not only maintain the logo’s symmetry and rhythm despite the breaks but it will make the letters more pronounced, reading KIA and not KN anymore; making the nightmare of identity crisis fade away, forever.
