A New Logo, A Bigger Story

3/25/2017
So, we updated our logo. Although it’s not a huge shift from the previous version, it does fix some balance issues and provides a more confident, modern and professional visual to represent our company. We’re really happy with our new mark, but that’s not what this article is about. Our updated logo is a culmination of a bigger story.

We’ve experienced more change in the last three years than the first seven of Showit’s existence. Since the articles of incorporation were signed in 2006, our goal was to give creative freedom to photographers. Our Flash-based web design platform, released in 2008, gave creative entrepreneurs the ability to create a website that was unique to their own brand and personality, which was a particularly bold approach at the time. Since then, our objective has remained the same, although lots of other changes have taken place.

Of all the changes we’ve experienced, the biggest was the friendly division between Showit (led by Todd Watson) and Pass (led by David Jay) in 2014. With Todd at the helm of Showit, we set out to revive a product that had taken a back seat over the preceding years.

Given the technological landscape at that time, there wasn’t much opportunity to improve our existing product; we knew we had to start from scratch. It was a huge task and a risky move, but we knew it was our only option. Flash was being supported less and less by web browsers, and the exponential increase of mobile usage demanded that we build a future-facing product for the good of our customers.

When we launched Showit 5 in early 2016, we needed to make it clear that it was more than just a new update to our website builder. Since Showit 5 was built on a completely different framework and there would be no compatibility or migration options from the old platform to the new one, we knew it had to be branded as a completely different product. We also knew that the technological landscape moving forward would naturally phase out Showit Desktop over time, so we set out to create a temporary brand for Showit 5 with the expectation that we would eventually drop the 5 and simply call it “Showit”.

Over the past 2 years, our team has worked really hard to build Showit 5 from the ground up and grow it to be a mature, powerful, feature-rich web design platform. The feedback we’ve received and the adoption rate we’ve experienced has been worth all the hard work, and we’re thrilled to announce that the majority of our subscribers are now on Showit 5.

So from here on out, we’re using our new logo for our corporate identity as well as our product logo for Showit 5. In all of our messaging, we’re gradually dropping the 5, and simply referring to our product as Showit, and only appending 5 or Desktop when speaking to our longer-standing customers who need that clarification. Also note that while the wordmark remains all uppercase in the logo, we prefer to type our company name in title case: Showit. That’s an uppercase S followed by all lowercase letters. Not SHOWIT, not ShowIt (capital I ), not Show-it. And, by all means, please do not exclude the O and W–that just makes us look crappy.

We’ve swapped in the new logo into the icon library in the Showit app, so if the Showit logo happens to be used on your website (say, in your footer), it will be automatically updated. If you need the Showit logo for anything, feel free to choose from the downloadable options on our Media page.

We’re so thankful for the road we’ve traveled these last 10+ years, and grateful for those of you who have joined us on the journey along the way. Here’s to the path ahead.