San Francisco — If you have been following the news lately, then you have perhaps discovered that logo redesigns are a new phenomenon. Beverly Hills, California-based social networking site M ySpace revealed today its new and upcoming logo at the 2010 Warm Gun: Designing Happiness conference in San Francisco, California. The new logo is “My” followed by a “Space,” which is actually not as bad as it sounds.
The concept is to emphasize the fact that users are the ones that make MySpace their own. It is a pretty interesting take on the idea, but maybe it is a bit too “interesting” for a mainstream site that has the scale of MySpace.
The new logos are not live yet, but the site has demonstrated it at the Warm Gun Design conference and the company elaborated on the idea saying that it plans to use the blank space in the logo to display artwork by remaining MySpace users. The artwork will only appear when individuals place their mouse cursor over the blank space though.
MySpace VP of User Experience Mike Macadaan explains the concept behind it, “MySpace is a platform for people to be whatever they want, so we have decided to give them the space to do it.”
Although it is not that hard to distinguish from the current logo which, while instantly recognizable, is not exactly the best example of great design. Apparently, MySpace plans to fill in the empty space with user generated content when users hover over the logo, to further drive home the point that MySpace is all about you.
Of course, that does not protect it from the criticism that is sure to pop up once the new logo starts to be rolled out. Still, MySpace’s biggest problem is not that people might not like it, it is that nobody may be left to see it. The social network still gets an impressive amount of traffic, especially in the US, but it has been declining for more than a year now. This while Facebook grew to 500 million users.
But, with all justification, the new logos’ art school abstractness and UGC element is better than the human centipede + Arial “myspace” graciousness of the old logo (see above), and from Macadaan’s presentation it looks like it will have some Google Doodle-like interactive features once the MySpace redesign launches as the end of this year.
Watch out the video below for more images of how the logo will look once it features the user-generated artwork.