Screenshot/TikTok – @emilyzugay
- A TikTok creator designed fake logos for TikTok, Tinder, Starbucks, Apple, and other companies.
- Some of the brands, including the Washington Post and Nascar, used her logos as profile pictures.
- The creator told Insider she's a 24-year-old pet portrait artist from Wisconsin.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
A TikTok creator's low-quality redesigns of corporate logos are being used by TikTok, Nascar, Tinder, Tampax, and other major brand accounts on the platform.
The designs are reminiscent of mediocre Microsoft Paint art, which has been a meme style for years, according to the meme-history website KnowYourMeme.
Creator Emily Zugay, a 24-year-old pet portrait artist from Southeast Wisconsin, told Insider in an email that she used Adobe Illustrator to make "repulsive but believable" designs, so that "even folks who don't know basic design principles would know that they are downright awful."
Zugay has over 880,000 followers on TikTok, where she shared the logo redesigns in three different viral videos. She posted the first one on September 8, the second on September 11, and the most recent clip last Thursday. The videos total over 37 million views and 5.5 million likes.
Zugay said she was "in utter disbelief" when she found out that major brands, as well as the Washington Post, were discovering and interacting with her posts, she wrote in an email.
"On any regular day, having one large brand comment on my video would make my entire week," Zugay said. "It felt surreal that they even noticed my videos."
Zugay's designs include a rehash of TikTok's logo. Her version is a picture of a pink and blue clock with all the big hand numbers in incorrect positions and the words "Tik Tock" layered above. It's a far cry from TikTok's classic colorful song note emblem.
Zugay also remade Nascar's logo, which featured the brand's name in bold white letters and multiple strips of color. Her edition put the brand's name in ultra-thin wavy letters and added three black horizontal lines next to them.
Zugay's Tampax logo is just the word "Tampax" in a pink-purple cursive font with a straight line hung underneath the text.
For Apple, Zugay ditched the brand's trademark gray logo and instead opted for a green box with the word "apple" in all-lowercase and a curly font hovering on top.
Zugay also remixed dating app Tinder's logo, which is ordinarily a red flame with the app's title in a soft, rounded font. Zugay's version called the app "TIDDNER" in a sharp font stitched above a coarse fire illustration. Tinder's official TikTok account was using Zugay's design as its profile picture as of Monday morning.
One of the most bizarre designs was Zugay's creative reinterpretation of the Washington Post logo, which she transformed into a horizontally stretched picture of former president George Bush inside a green frame. Zugay also placed yellow stars and the words "washington post" in a low-quality cursive font atop the image.
The Washington Post's official TikTok account is currently using the image as its profile picture and created a sketch in response to Zugay's clip. The sketch video features a man pretending to hold a staff meeting where he presents Zugay's video and has other employees vote on whether to adopt the logo.
"I believe the logo videos did well because of the companies I chose to 'rebrand,'" Zugay said. "They are all very well known. I think anytime something familiar is tampered with, it opens the floodgates for people's reactions."
Other brands also made response videos to the original clips.
On Saturday, the official Adobe account made a response video in which people could be seen printing out pictures of the creator's low-effort Adobe logo revamp - just the word "adobe" pasted above a crude red and white gradient - and hanging them around the company's office. "Wonder if anyone will notice?" reads the caption of the video, which has over 200,000 views.
On Sunday, Zugay posted a follow-up TikTok reacting to the platform's official account changing their logo to her design. In the clip, she covered her mouth with her hand in disbelief while a text-to-speech voice asked, "What have I done?"
Zugay told Insider that she's "having a lot of fun with it" and plans to create more logos.
Tinder, Nascar, Adobe, TikTok, and Tampax did not respond to a request for comment.
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