When we started Planbnb in 2014, the logo was the least of our worries. We had properties to onboard, an owner in Nea Iraklitsa asking why her booking calendar wasn’t syncing, and a check-in process we were still figuring out as we went. But the logo we picked in those early weeks has quietly followed us through every stage of the company’s growth, and this year we finally gave it an update. This post is about that change: what it looked like before, what it looks like now, what we deliberately kept, and why a logo redesign is never really about the logo.
The Original Mark
The first Planbnb logo paired a house outline with a rocket sitting inside it, a small blue dot at the rocket’s center like a porthole or an ignition point. The idea behind it was straightforward almost to the point of being literal: a house, because we manage homes, and a rocket, because we wanted the properties we managed to take off. Launch a listing, watch it climb the search rankings, watch the bookings come in. The house gave the rocket a container, a sense that the launch was happening from somewhere specific, somewhere domestic. It made sense as a first pass, and it did its job for a decade.
It was also, if we’re honest, a logo drawn by two people building a company, not two people who had spent years thinking about visual identity. We built Planbnb ourselves in 2014, my wife and I, and the priority order was: get the properties listed, get the guests checked in, get the reviews in, and somewhere down that list, have a logo that looked professional enough not to embarrass us on a business card. The house-and-rocket mark cleared that bar. It was legible at small sizes, it printed fine, and it had just enough of a story behind it that we could explain it in one sentence if anyone asked. Most people didn’t ask. That’s usually how logos work when a company is small: nobody scrutinizes the icon, they scrutinize whether the WiFi password works and whether the reply to their message came back in ten minutes or three hours.
Why We Changed It
The honest answer is that the old mark had done its job and had also, over ten years, started to feel like it belonged to a different, earlier version of the company. In 2014 we were two people with a spreadsheet and a handful of listings. Today Planbnb manages more than 50 properties spread across Kavala, Nea Iraklitsa, Nea Peramos, and Palio, we’ve built our own self-check-in system rather than relying on someone else’s off-the-shelf solution, and we’ve spent years refining a commission-only pricing model that ties our success directly to the owner’s. The house-and-rocket mark, with its enclosed, contained feel, didn’t quite match a company that had spread across four towns and was actively building a growth strategy aimed at owners who don’t even live in Greece.
There’s also a simpler, less strategic reason: the old logo was busier than it needed to be. A house outline containing a rocket containing a dot is three nested shapes asking to be read in sequence. At the sizes logos actually get used, favicon-small on a browser tab, thumbnail-small on a WhatsApp profile, the nesting collapsed into a blur. A logo that only reads clearly at business-card size isn’t doing its job in 2026, when most people are meeting your brand for the first time on a five-inch screen.
The New Mark
The new logo almost strips the house away and lets the rocket stand on its own, drawn in outline with a clean triangular nose, a circular window rendered as a simple ring rather than a filled dot, and three small flame marks trailing beneath it. It’s a more confident, more finished piece of iconography than the original. Where the old mark asked you to notice a house and then notice a rocket inside it, the new mark just shows you a rocket in the middle of taking off. Nothing else is competing for attention.
Losing the house was the biggest decision in the redesign, and it’s worth explaining why we were comfortable with it. The house in the old logo was doing representational work, telling you literally “this is about property.” But a decade into running Planbnb, we don’t think the company needs to explain that it’s a property business through its icon. The name does that. “Planbnb” already tells you what category you’re in. The icon’s job isn’t to repeat the name in picture form, it’s to carry the feeling we want people to associate with us, and “launch” is a feeling, while “house” is just a fact. Once we separated those two jobs, dropping the house and keeping the rocket wasn’t really a hard call.
The rocket also reads better on its own as a piece of shape design. An outlined rocket with a ringed window and trailing flame marks has a clear silhouette even when it’s rendered at sixteen pixels. It survives being embroidered on a polo shirt, printed on a keychain tag left in a welcome basket, or shrunk down to a favicon that shows up in a browser tab next to twenty other tabs. That kind of resilience across sizes and materials matters more than it sounds like it should, because a logo doesn’t live in one place. It lives on an invoice, on a lockbox sticker by a front door, on the side of a van, on a social post competing with a hundred other posts in the same scroll.
The Wordmark: Why Axiforma
The rocket icon gets most of the attention, but the “planbnb” wordmark sitting next to it is doing just as much work, and that’s where the other real change happened. We set the new wordmark in Axiforma, a rounded, geometric sans-serif, replacing the typeface the original logo used.
We picked Axiforma for the same reason we simplified the icon: legibility at small sizes without losing personality. Its letterforms are geometric and evenly weighted, which keeps “planbnb” readable whether it’s sitting in a header at full size or shrunk down into a footer credit, but the slightly rounded terminals keep it from feeling cold or overly corporate. That balance mattered to us. A short-term rental brand is still a hospitality brand at its core, and we didn’t want a typeface so severe it stopped feeling like a company run by people who actually walk into these properties and greet guests at the door.
The lowercase-only treatment also carried over from the original wordmark. “planbnb” in lowercase reads as approachable rather than formal, which fits how most people actually encounter us: through a casual WhatsApp exchange about a check-in time, not a formal business letter. Axiforma’s lowercase set is where the typeface earns its keep, since the double “b” and the “p” and “n” pairings all needed to sit cleanly together without the word turning into a blur of similar strokes, which is a real risk with a name that repeats letterforms as much as “planbnb” does.
What We Kept: The Blue
If there’s one decision in this redesign that took the least debate, it was the color. The new logo is rendered in the exact same blue as the original. We didn’t lighten it, darken it, shift it toward teal or navy, or run it through a rebrand exercise where someone hands you a new palette because the old one “tested better.” Ten years of guests, owners, and partners in Kavala, Nea Iraklitsa, Nea Peramos, and Palio have seen that blue on booking confirmations, on check-in instructions, on the side of the paperwork we hand over at property visits. Changing it would have meant asking everyone who already recognizes Planbnb to relearn what to look for, and for what gain. Color recognition is one of the fastest, most durable things a brand builds, faster than people remembering a tagline, faster than people remembering an icon’s exact shape. Blue is what says “this is Planbnb” from across a room or at the bottom of an email signature, even before anyone reads a word. Keeping it wasn’t a compromise, it was the one part of the old identity that had already earned the right to stay exactly as it was.
So the redesign isn’t really a story about starting over. It’s a story about editing. We kept the color that people already recognize, we kept the rocket because it’s still the right symbol for what we’re trying to do for the owners we work with, and we removed the one element, the house outline, that was doing less work than it used to and was making the mark harder to read at a glance.
What the Logo Has to Represent Now
Ten years ago, the rocket in our logo mostly meant “your listing will do well.” That’s still true, but it’s a smaller part of the story than it used to be. A meaningful share of the properties in the Planbnb portfolio now belong to owners who live abroad, particularly Bulgarian and German owners who own homes in the Kavala region but aren’t in the country day to day. For that owner, the idea of a “launch” isn’t just about ranking in Airbnb search. It’s about handing a property to a team a border or two away and trusting that the whole operation, pricing set through Hosthub, guest communication, self-check-in, cleaning turnover, will happen without them needing to be in the room. The rocket has to carry that trust now, not just the promise of bookings.
That’s a heavier job for a small piece of line art to do, which is part of why we wanted the icon itself to be as clear and unambiguous as possible. A logo that’s slightly hard to parse chips away, in a small way, at the confidence someone feels handing their property over to a company they may never meet in person. A logo that reads instantly, the same blue rocket, mid-launch, whether it’s on a website header or a WhatsApp profile photo, is a small but real part of making that distance feel smaller.
The Practical Side of a Logo Change
A logo swap isn’t just a design file getting replaced. Anywhere the old house-and-rocket mark lived, the website header, the favicon, the Hosthub-connected booking confirmations, printed materials at the properties themselves, has to be tracked down and updated, or the two marks end up living side by side indefinitely, which defeats the purpose of the change. We’re working through that list now, starting with the highest-visibility spots, the site header and the favicon, and moving down to the physical materials that only get replaced a few at a time as they naturally cycle out at each property.
We’re not in a hurry to erase every trace of the old mark overnight, and we don’t think guests or owners need to be told “please forget the old logo.” Brand transitions that get treated like a big announcement often end up drawing more attention to the change than the change itself deserves. The way most people will experience this update is quietly: the next time they check Planbnb’s website, or get a new booking confirmation, the rocket will look a little different, a little cleaner, and the blue will look exactly the same as it always has.
Why This Post Exists
We don’t usually write about our own branding, and this might be the last post of its kind for a while. The reason it’s worth writing about at all is that a decade is a long time to run a company on a mark you sketched out before you had any real sense of what the company would become. The original house-and-rocket logo was right for a two-person operation figuring out short-term rental management for the first time in Kavala. The rocket on its own, same blue, cleaner lines, is a better fit for a company managing more than fifty properties across four towns, with its own self-check-in system, a decade of commission-only client relationships, and a growth strategy built around owners who trust us from another country entirely.
The house is “almost” gone. The rocket is still climbing. The blue never changed.
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