Writing for Designers

When a friend recently told me that Comcast was changing its name to Xfinity, I couldn’t help but think: why do they want to sound like a bad sci-fi movie?  Apparently others had something else in mind and thought it sounded like Comcast was entering the porn business.  After the last couple of years of competition with Verizon Fios (where Comcast was able to hold their own), I had to find out what made the cable giant think that a) they needed to rebrand,  b) Xfinity was a good name, and c) it’s a good logo.

In Time’s Comcast’s New Name: Rated X? Sean Gregory informs us that even amidst Comcast’s newest task of taking on NBC they thought that rebranding their cable and internet service division was key to showing the market that they are on top of the game with their Project Infinity. To me that’s called competition and keeping up the fight with Verizon.  I’m not sure if they had to go so far as to completely rebrand something that was already working with increased revenue in ’09 despite the economy.

Pretending that we can get past the rebranding to Xfinity, lets talk about the logo.  If your new company name is going to be strange and misleading,  at least make a good logo out of it.  I’ll admit, I’m just a design student that only has one or two courses under my belt, but my gut tells me that the Xfinity logo is just as bad as the whole rebranding in the first place.  It’s boring and makes you want to scream the name like an overexcited sports announcer at a monster truck event.  With the color gradient it seems outdated, and the only elements of marginal interest are the descenders of the x and y and the fact that they stayed with the color red. With a good name successful logo design can be just about the letterforms.  In the case of Xfinity, they would have been better off diverting attention elsewhere.

You know, with all this said I’m not sure I even know what Xfinity stands for.  I can’t seem to get past the horrible name and the logo that backs it up.  Since I can’t say it any better, as brand expert Rob Frankel was quoted in Gregory’s article, “If you are going to rebrand, it should communicate a strategy. Now you’ll just say, ‘The old Comcast guys f_____ up my cable.’ “  Lesson learned:  if you’re going to have internet outages and cable freezes, at least choose a good name
(and a good logo) so we can remember who to curse.