We at Zane Benefits recently changed our entire branding.  From colors to logos to fonts to images, everything is new.  Companies do this all the time as a way to change their image, but that's actually not the original reason I came up with all the new branding.

Our old logo was sort of boring, as were the colors, but they weren't so boring that I really minded.  Only one thing bothered me and that was the logo font which was a traditional serif font.  Everything else on our site was, and always had been sans-serif and I really wanted to get the logo consistent.  I understand that having a different style of font for the logo is a good look sometimes, but this wasn't one of those times.

So I just made the change.  Same logo and everything, but a new font.  It seemed like a pretty minor change so I didn't even give it a second though.  Well, as soon as everyone else at Zane Benefits saw it, they hated it.  No one liked it.  Several different people couldn't even tell me what had changed but they knew something was wrong and it bothered them.

The problem wasn't that the logo was any worse.  The problem was that the logo was so similar to the old one that people weren't capable of judging it on its own.  I'm 100% sure that new visitors to the site would have responded positively to the sans-serif font, but there was no way to convince the Zane employees that were used to it looking a certain way for the past two years.

So I completely redesigned it.  It's radically different now.  While I was at it, I changed our entire brand.  Overall it's a huge improvement (in my opinion) but I think it's really funny that the reason all those changes came about was that I realized no one would let me make a minor change.  By showing everyone a completely new look and feel, I put them in a frame of mind where they were judging the design based on its merits rather than comparing it to what they were used to.

We all know how resistant people are to change.

So I guess the moral of the story is that you sometimes need to make major changes in order to push through something that should have been very simple.  If someone loves a certain brand of pizza, you're probably better off cooking some other dish for them instead of cooking them your style of pizza.  They won't be able to help comparing your version to one that they are already very fond of.