Creating the ByteDance Logo: A Look Into Our Brand Design Team

As our products began to grow in popularity around the globe, we realized that the branding we first started with in 2012 needed a revamp to reflect our evolving business goals. A major part of our brand redesign focused on the ByteDance logo: how could we create something fresh and recognizable that captured the dynamic nature of our products and work?

As part of the logo redesign, we asked a number of our design teams to participate and come up with their own versions. To learn more about the process behind creating the logo we use today, we spoke with Yuan Fang, a member of the winning design team. Yuan spoke about his role as a Brand Designer, the creativity behind our logo, and the impact his work has had over the last few years following ByteDance's rapid growth.

"I actually jumped into things in the middle of the redesign process. While others were more focused on the local side of brand design, my role was to incorporate branding elements that could resonate globally. We had many design teams working on their own drafts of the logo -- like a healthy competition or one big A/B test -- so a smaller team like mine wasn't too confident ours would be chosen! Fortunately, the instructions we received left a ton of room for creativity, so we had space to create a logo that was truly innovative and distinct from the others."

"When we thought about how to design the logo, we had to consider that ByteDance is not necessarily tied just to one product; rather, we're a parent company with a suite of different products, so our logo needed to have features and colors that were clearly different from those of our products. We also wanted to make something unique and iconic, like the Apple logo, that people would see and recognize immediately.

The first thing we did was play around with the letters B and D to see if there was a creative way to make them feel more like a graphic than just letters. We settled on the arrangement with rectangles you see now, making sure their shapes were structured but dynamic -- reflecting both the 'byte' and 'dance' parts of our name. Not everyone realizes it right away, but you can see the two letters if you look closely! For the colors, we ended up choosing blue to capture the fresh and energetic spirit of our culture, and mixed in some green so that the overall colors felt less flat. This was a refreshing change from our previous logo, which was plain red and black text and felt more formal."

"The photo above shows all the different versions of the logos we were considering. As you can see, there were several different directions -- some with more of an emphasis on the coding and technology part of our identity, others focusing more on our global mission, and so on. It was hard to decide whether the logo should be more on the creative or 'rational' side, but in the end my team's version emerged as a bit of a happy middle ground. The dynamic elements really resonated with our culture and products."

"I joined ByteDance at the beginning of 2019 during our corporate rebranding. I was drawn to ByteDance for its global vision and success with TikTok, which I knew would add an exciting scale to my work. So although my team had fewer than 10 people when I joined, there was always potential for us to grow and make an impact; now, we're a team of more than 50 brand designers! As the company and its products have grown rapidly over the last two years, it's been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a key role in shaping the brand. It's rare to find a place where you can be involved with essential projects and have so much autonomy from day one."

Want to join Yuan and the rest of our team at ByteDance? Whether you're working in Brand Design or R&D, everyone at ByteDance gets the chance to make a real impact. If you're excited to grow with us, visit our jobs page to browse open positions and make sure to follow ByteDance on LinkedIn for the latest updates.