A Chinese Logo Cleverly Designed for Hyper Growth in the Next 30 Years

Roll Bloomingdale’s and Walmart and a suburban sports complex into one conglomerate super-shopping-center, and you can begin to imagine the immensity of MixC. The Chinese mega-mall chain has everything from Prada to Spaghetti House to ice skating rinks. There are about 30 in all, each massive, and in Dachong, a new city-development being built from the ground up in Shenzhen, it’s going to be more or less the only place for residents to go shopping.
In this city-of-the-future, the developers want to build a MixC that could be expanded into an MixC World. Someday, they might build an MixC Universe. As MixC grows, it’s going to need a logo that can grow too. It’s current one can’t do that. (Check it out here.)
“We did a page by page explanation to talk about the evidence for why this is so poorly designed,” says Natasha Jen, the partner at Pentagram who realized that their current logo wasn’t up to the task of growing gracefully.
There’s some type nerdery involved here, but: “It has the ‘The’ super, super small, and then they have ‘MixC’ really, really large. It will become a problem when you scale up or scale down the whole thing, because the tiny part will become invisible, but then when you scale up the fat part will become so fat, so everything will look disproportional,” Jen says. Plus, the spacing was a disaster. “It’s so irrational. This form itself is fractured visually. There’s no horizontal alignment with these letters, and it’s nearly impossible to pair it with anything.”

Pentagram

Clever Angles

Jen and her team did a complete overhaul of the logo, and turned the MixC into a crisp, box-shaped icon that adheres to some geometric rules (Jen points out that Massimo Vignelli’s Bloomingdale’s logo is similarly geometric in that it’s based on circles). It’s a pretty simple solution: by stacking the different text elements, and slanting the legs of the ‘X’ on a 45 degree angle, Jen created a logo that can accommodate a new row of characters, like ‘World’ or ‘Universe.’ And the simplicity of the 45 degree angle means the logo can sync with right angles or 180 degree angles—found in both English and Chinese characters—without looking visually discordant.
When Jen shared the look with the development’s executives, “they were really shocked,” she says. “This new logo implies that they will have to go back to the 30 or so existing malls and retrofit all the signage based on this logo. It’s a tremendous amount of work.” At this point, Jen laid out a side-by-side comparison of how the two logos would morph over the next 20 and 30 years. Where the old logo started to uncontrollably outwards with each new character, the new one stayed succinctly in place with each iteration. Plus, the new logo can inspire all manner of wallpaper and signage, making the entire complex feel more modern. She convinced them to make a clean break.
A new graphic identity can sometimes seem like little more than icing. The individual stores at MixC get to keep their identities, so why sweat over the mall’s shoddy logo? This isn’t one of those instances. Not only has the MixC logo influenced other visual touch points in its malls—a place that relies on strong aesthetics if it’s going to entice shoppers—it’s going to become part of the fabric of a brand new model of living in China. Shanghai has become the capitalist capital of China, but Shenzhen is a product of a new kind of capitalism, one that weaves in policies that seem like a throwback to the country’s Communist years. Current President Xi Jingpin, for instance, has introduced austerity drives to weed out corrupt gift-giving among politicians. Plus, the Dachong model of living is a shared, public space. At the same time, it’s going to brim with luxury brands and retail—two keys to China’s transition from a manufacturing-led economy to one like America’s, driven by good old fashioned consumer lust