Her eyes command a warm confidence. Her hair ripples as an ocean wave that laps provocatively over her breasts. Every bit the face of Starbucks since 2011, the Siren logo is alluring by design, beckoning you into the store to catch a latte or pastry. Her face is so perfect, it is its own mirror, with the left and right sides copied to lucifer up like a Rorschach examination.

But when the global branding team at Lippincott was staring at her on a wall vii years ago, she but didn't work–and they didn't know why. She wasn't beautiful; she was uncannily beautiful, a bit creepy, to exist honest, giving you a funny feeling in your breadbasket similar she was a beat of a person, like an alien or robot pretending to be a human.

"Equally a team nosotros were like, 'There's something not working here, what is information technology?'" recounts global creative director Connie Birdsall. "It was like, 'Oh, we need to step dorsum and put some of that humanity back in. The imperfection was important to making her really successful every bit a marking."

Specifically, Lippincott realized that to look homo, the Siren couldn't be symmetrical, despite the fact that symmetry is the well-studied definition of man beauty. She had to be asymmetrical. Can you lot run across it at present that you know? Look closely at her eyes. Do you notice how her olfactory organ dips lower on the correct than the left? That was the gear up of just a few pixels that made the Siren work.

"In the terminate, simply for the face office of the drawing, at that place's a slight disproportion to it. It has a bit more than shadow on the right side of the face," says design partner Bogdan Geana. "It felt a fleck more homo, and felt less like a perfectly cut mask."

Step by pace, from the previous logo to the new one. Note how the most polished Siren occurs in the middle of the process, and then designers revert to asymmetry. [Photo: courtesy Lippincott]

The Origins Of The Siren

Of grade, Lippincott didn't depict the Siren from scratch. She'd been around since the very starting time Starbucks location in 1971. The double-tailed mermaid appears to be a reference to an Italian medieval character Starbucks has claimed as "Norse"–just in any case, the imagery, born from a maritime book, inspired its founders to make her the logo of the Seattle coffee shop.

The logo they were redesigning in 2011 was what Birdsall lovingly dubbed "the donut," and it represented a much more mature Starbucks brand that had already disrupted java house civilization every bit we in one case knew it.

The donut had all sorts of problems. In the U.S., the Starbucks logo was the postage of ubiquity for the same coffee store on every corner. Recognizable? Certain. Only it was so bounded inside its own circle that the brand had to be presented in a strict, logo-bound way that read exactly what a consumer might exist sick of seeing, "Starbucks Coffee [sign]." At the same time, Starbucks had ambitions beyond selling coffee. It wanted to sell more breakfast foods (a year subsequently, it would buy La Boulange bakery for $100 million), and perhaps even sell wine to visitors at dark. It also wanted to sell more than products in a supermarket, and information technology needed a tool other than the sign of its coffee store to exercise so.

Abroad, the logo was equally problematic. Around it was a ring that read "Starbucks Coffee," and that shape drew your heart so much that yous might non even find the topless woodcut mermaid inside. That circle was and so prominent that it drew your attending above all other elements, which allowed knock-off coffee shops to alter minor bits of the logo to fool consumers new to the brand.

"How did you know if you were at the existent Starbucks in Cathay?" asks Birdsall. "Around the world, y'all would go people writing "stars and bucks" and putting a deer in the eye. The blueprint was very replicable, and it was hard to police force because it fooled your heart."

Together, Starbucks'south internal blueprint team and Lippincott adult a new approach: Pause the Siren out of her circle. Make her the confront of the visitor. Re-color her from black to Starbucks light-green. And with all that brand equity in place, merely delete the words "Starbucks" and "coffee" birthday. They were unnecessary.

The siren became more symmetrical, and even got friendly eyes, before the designers reverted dorsum to a more mysterious, asymmetrical pattern. [Photograph: courtesy Lippincott]

Finding The Siren's Personality

As a true woodcut–literally carved from wood and stamped–the Siren in the donut logo was a fiddling rough for a modern corporate make. She wasn't ready for her close-upwardly. So Lippincott began her makeover. "We looked at her proportions. The head was a scrap too broad, the body felt too squat," says Geana. "And then we started adjusting and revising these forms, make them crisp, designed, and geometric."

But at present that they were defining the drawing better, they also had to define the Siren improve. She now existed at such a high resolution that you could really inspect her personality. And then the designers began to question merely who the Siren should exist, because that Siren would literally be the face of Starbucks.

"Is she more natural and welcoming? Does she present confidence? Does she feel like a seductress?" recalls Geana, noting that adjusting her features just fractions of an inch created massive changes in her personality. "In the terminate we decided that giving her a mythical, mysterious, attracting quality was something we wanted to retain."

Subsequently the team had sharpened every particular into absolute corporate logo perfection, Lippincott realized that information technology had gone too far. "Nosotros didn't want her to be perfect, like Barbie, or other brands with characters," says Birdsall. "Wendy is too perfect. [The Siren] is more worldly. And not in the negative sense of 'worldly.'"

And so the designers reconsidered her makeover. They added some rounder details, softening the edges. And they finally recognized the core problem of geometry: her beauty-defining symmetry itself.

"We had [the iterations] altogether, and all pinned up on a wall. And we all stood around debating and debating and debating," says Birdsall. And that'due south when the team realized that, despite what we've all been led to believe about human being bewitchery, no one actually liked looking at a perfect face after all. "It was a eureka moment."