W3C logo refresh: more than a cosmetic change, a small step towards durable and sustainable success

Today, 14 October, is World Standards Day, a day that honors standards development organizations and aims to bring to the attention of regulators, industry and consumers the importance of standardization to the global economy. W3C has been a part of the international standards community for over three decades, and in that time we have gone through many changes.

Most recently, we rolled out a new logo, which to some can seem like a simple aesthetic change, but is in fact a much bigger thing. W3C had been using basically the same logo since 1997. Our Communications team performed a discrete logo renewal, slightly rounding most of its edges in 2022 when W3C became its own public-interest, non-profit organization, though the change was subtle and went largely unnoticed. This was by design: we aimed to modernize the 25 year-old logo without losing brand recognition.

The launch of our new logo continues a rebranding process that the W3C Marketing and Communications team started in 2018 when the transition to our non-profit status as W3C Inc. began. Building on initial research, we analyzed our brand identity, audience, and reputation as well as other organizations in the technical ecosystem. Starting in 2019, these efforts have resulted in ongoing updates to our language, the redesign of our website which launched in 2023, and most recently in the launch of a new logo this month. Our new logo press release explains our design intentions. More changes are to come as we aim to reach new stakeholders and engage with current ones more effectively.

Which brings me to why it’s a big thing. The adoption of a new logo, as well as changing our tagline from ‘leading the web to its full potential’ to ‘making the web work — for everyone’, sends a clear signal to attract attention towards the 2025–2028 Strategic Objectives and Initiatives that I introduced to our Members and here in this blog a few months ago.

The previous logo and tagline served us very well for more than twenty years. Our new logo captures our essence as a solid, innovative, and evolving organization. Today, everything we are doing converges toward one focal point: articulating the impact we want to have and providing alignment across the entire consortium.

Our work has enabled one unified web for all, driven by our vision and mission to develop interoperable web standards that benefit humanity and serve the public interest.

The logo and the strategic objectives initiatives are a very timely display of a greater ability to face change and meet it. Grounded in our strong position, we must embark on adapting ourselves to be more agile, to improve our process, to reach a broader set of stakeholders to further create resilience and enhance our work on standards and increase our influence in the world.

So with that, we have developed four key strategic objectives, illustrated here:

1. Solidify our structure
   There is more to do to further our mission to interconnect humanity. To maintain our positive impact on the world in fast changing times, we need to ensure that our underlying structure, processes, and policies for nurturing ideas from innovation to standardization will effectively enable all of our future work.
2. Enhance our impact
   The web needs W3C to be more impactful. As the web grows, it undergoes massive changes. There is a lot going on for technologists, standard developers, web users. The web needs W3C to be a driver of change, in alignment with our values and vision. To learn more on this, please read my July post, written after we published ‘Vision for W3C’ as a W3C Statement.
3. Diversify our support
   This objective is in large part aimed at diversifying our financial support to ensure our long-term viability. In addition, as a new 501(c)(3) and in the interest of preserving our Public Charity status, W3C must boost our efforts to diversify sources of funding. We have started building additional capacity around fundraising, to engage the philanthropic sector more effectively. We are also working to improve and expand the ways in which people and organizations that share our values can support us through donations, sponsorship and corporate social responsibility. We are also proactively engaging donors through funding opportunities aligned with our horizontals, looking to address specific needs and aspirations of the consortium. Please, do read more on the ways you can support us.
4. Broaden our footprint
   Last year we celebrated W3C's 30th anniversary. For W3C to still have a meaningful impact in 30 years, we must expand our reach to involve communities to ensure a truly world-wide perspective. It is essential, so that we can listen to the parts of the world that are not yet touched by the web, or where we’re not prominent, so we can serve them as well.

This brand refresh is the first major marketing campaign in the life of our 31 year-old consortium and 2 year-old corporation. It is more than an aesthetic change. It is a sign of our evolution and one of the steps towards durable and sustainable success for W3C. The 2025-2028 Strategic Objectives Initiatives are part of our first major strategic roadmap effort.

While the web has had and will continue to have a significant impact on the global economy, ultimately our mission is far more than that, and so I would like to close by quoting from our mission statement that “W3C makes the web work — for everyone”. We do so by bringing together global stakeholders to develop open standards that enable a World Wide Web that connects and empowers humanity. In honor of World Standards Day, I ask you to help celebrate the impact that our work for an open web has achieved and help us face the challenges ahead. Share with your network of contacts the many ways in which it is possible to support us.