Meizu is a Chinese consumer electronics brand, founded in 2003 by Jack Wong in Zhuhai. The company’s focus is in smartphones, but originally it was manufacturing mp3players. Meizu is the 11th largest smartphone manufacturer in the world.
Meaning and history
Meizu is one of the top 10 Chinese smartphone manufacturers, which was founded in Zhuhai in 2003 by an entrepreneur named Jack Wong.
The full name of the company is Meizu Technology Co., and the most popular version of the meaning of “Meizu” is “Enchanted Generation”, or “Generation of Innovation”, which correlates well with the main focus of the company, smartphones.
However, the company’s first products were far from being phones, but MP3 players, which were at the peak of popularity in the early 2000s. A landmark year for the company was 2006 when one of the first Chinese MP4 players – Meizu MiniPlayer – was launched on the market. It was not just a music player, as you could watch videos and play games on the device. However, the company soon refocused and finally started producing cell phones.
The real success of the company came in the early 2010s after they started producing Meizu smartphones running the proprietary operating system Flyme, based on Android.
Soon Alibaba Group became interested in the company, which was followed by a rather impressive investment of $ 590 million, the main purpose of financing was to create and promote its own operating system YunOS. Up to the end of 2023, Meizu pleased its fans with new models of smartphones, but in early 2024 the Chinese company decided to reorient its activities and focus on the development and creation of devices based on Artificial Intelligence.
2003 – 2005
The original Meizu logo, created in 2003, was executed in a light yet strict gray and white color palette with a bold stylized wordmark with the company’s name in English, set in thick rounded bars, accompanied by a slanted Chinese inscription with the narrowed hieroglyphs. The badge stayed in use by the company for the first two years of its history.
2005 – 2015
The old Meizu logo was also blue over the white background. The overall style of the letters was pretty much the same. And yet, there was also an unusual approach used in this wordmark: each of the following letters was lighter than its predecessor.
Thus, the “m” was the heaviest one, the “e” and “i” were lighter than the “m,” yet bolder than the “z” and “u,” and so on.
2007 – 2008
For just several months in 2007, Meizu was using a very interesting logo with the name of the company handwritten in tall and smooth Chinese hieroglyphs, with thin bars and distinctive contours. The blue inscription was written against a white background and enclosed into a square frame with rounded angles.
2015 – 2020
The Meizu logo is an example of classic visual identity for the brand’s industry. Its logo is a bold wordmark in light blue on a white background.
The custom typeface has clean lines and due to the use of only lowercase letters, looks very modern and technological.
Blue is one of the most popular colors for IT and electronic companies logos. Blue represents trust, security, and reliability as well as high quality and high technology.
2015 – 2023
Another version of the Meizu logo, created in 2015, featured the same style of lettering, yet it was written in distinctive black lines against a white background. This badge stayed in use by the brand for longer, as it was more universal and strong.
2020 – 2023
In 2020 the light blue Meizu insignia, designed in 2015, was intensified by the use of a darker and brighter shade of blue. With this new hue, the stylized geometric inscription started looking bolder and more confident.
2023 – Today
The redesign of 2023 has introduced a more complicated Meizu logo, with black lowercase lettering, resembling the one from the version 2020, but with thinner brash and sharper shapes, and a bold bright emblem. The new element of the badge is the enlarged stylized capital “M” in scarlet red, with the straight diagonal bars and the right vertical replaced by a square dot.