Evolving the Burton Snowboard Brand Identity

The brand has a storied history with logos, with updates incrementally happening every few years and even a brief period where the logo deliberately changed every season. As the brand continues to grow so does the need for consistency and continuity.

We identified a path forward building on the legacy of two key brand marks, while ensuring that the update remained unmistakably Burton — a combination of our Mountain Logo from the early 80's, and our bar logo.

The mountain logo is the original, created during the genesis of the brand, and the bar logo was present during one of the brands most culturally significant eras. Both of these marks have had a lasting presence within the snowboard industry since its humble beginings.

The original mountain shape and Helvetica Black text from the bar logo went through rigorous revisions and refinement. Balancing positive and negative form, redrawing the overall shape and adjusting kerning for maximum scalability.

The resulting combined identities are clearly recognizable as our logo, but with vast improvements to its usability across all brand and product applications.

While the solution may seem obvious, through the process we looked at hundreds of alternate solutions. We partnered with a network of designers and studios to make sure we weren't overlooking something simply by updating an existing identity. This exploration and testing work helped validate our approach, that a simple update to a historic logo can bring the best of the past forward and modernize it.