March 28, 2024

T-Mobile’s Fierce Color Ownership

“Stop using magenta, or else.” is pretty much the message received by OXY, a smartwatch company, from a notice of “threatened opposition” from T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom AG. OXY received the letter containing this message’s days before the the company was about to receive its official trademark.

T-Mobile Fight Magenta
At first it didn’t make sense why T-Mobile would got after Oxy and demand that they not use the color magenta in their branding. Oxy is after all a completely different market relating to wearable and not the telecom industry. However, after reviewing how many time T-Mobile has threatened other tech companies against using magenta in their products or marketing, it all started to make sense. Back in 2008 the telecom company threatened Engadget Mobile, a tech blog, for its use of magenta and again in 2013 sued AT&T’s Aio Wireless for using too similar a color scheme.

Nemo Seagulls – MINE!

“Since we didn’t have the financial resources to fight Deutsche Telekom AG on this matter, and because we also didn’t want to just ignore them, we basically had two options left: We could either negotiate with Telekom to find a price for using the old logo, or we could change everything,”  – Raf, OXY

Unfortunately OXY was forced to modify over 25K image files and designed work to avoid any legal problems. Below is OXY’s new logo and identity colors.

oxy

Editor-in-chief for WebDesignLedger.com. Paulina uses creative intelligence to create everything digital, printable, searchable, minimal, visual and analytical. She has a passion for design and is the founder of UltraArte, a digital marketing & design consultancy. Follow her on Twitter

One Comment

  1. Johnny Ohl Reply

    Paulina, I love getting your newsletter. I try to read every article, but this article has so many mistakes in it that it was hard to get through. I know negative feedback is hard to get, but I know you must have worked very hard researching, writing, and editing this piece. It deserves to be read and talked about. If I wrote the article, it would be so much worse, trust me. Maybe you can edit the piece real quick, delete my comment and none will be the wiser 😉

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