This past month, pizzeria giant Pizza Hut rolled out a new logo for all their branding and identity purposes. They ditched the red, yellow, green, and black logo for a clean, one color(two colors if white is used) look. The shiny button effect on the hut is also replaced with simple flat colors, as is the trend today. All the recognizable pieces of the logo remain intact as before, with the exception of the underscore being removed. In order to make the dot on the “i” distinguishable in the one color mark, the hut shape was raised above the dot rather than overlapping it. All the elements are placed inside a red circle, which represents a dollop of red tomato sauce. The hut portion can also appear by itself in the dollop. It appears this logo update is a “less is more” approach. So, do they succeed?
One of the criticisms I have seen is that the hut shape by itself looks too much like a flying saucer. Although I concede that the hut shape resembles a stereotypical UFO, no one is going to mistake Pizza Hut for an alien novelty shop. The Pizza Hut Brand has reached a level of recognizability that the hut shape accompanied by red is all you really need to recognize the symbol as representing the pizza chain. The ways in which the simple update is incorporated in all of the branding works well the the textured black backgrounds and bold white letters. In other words, in this case, context is king and the new logo is being utilized for the new branding scheme very effectively. In this particular case for Pizza Hut, I think less really is more.