If you have seen the new Avast website (available only in English and French right now) or products, you have surely seen our new logo:

This is the other item that the team has been hard at work on along with the products and website. Like all logos, you probably wonder what it is….or what does it mean? And of course, you may wonder how much we paid to a design agency to come up with this. So first things first, we have a great designer here at Avast: Martin.

In addition to designing the logo, Martin is responsible for all the graphics and design you see in the web site, the products, and the marketing materials. And he has even done all of our door and wall designs here in our new building. You may wonder how it is possible that a single person does all of this. It is easy, he works 36 hours a day.

So, from simplest to most complicated, here are the new elements of our "identity"

• The word "avast!". As you may notice, the font has been cleaned up a bit from what you see in 4.8. That was to make it more readable. Mainly, some people read it as "avasti". Try it, google "avasti" and you will see. Unfortunately you will see that scammers also latched onto that. Anyways, it should now be clear that it is "avast".
• What does avast mean? Our founders (Eda and Pavel) actually started using this as our product name many, many years ago. They were looking for a word that started with "AV" and that had a good meaning…..and they found avast. The word is an old nautical term meaning "stop". And of course, it has been made famous lately in Pirates of the Caribbean and Shrek. A very fitting name for an antivirus product.
  
• be free. This is now our slogan and it has many meanings. First is the obvious—we distribute a free security product and encourage consumer users around the world to just use our free product—no need to pay the large traditional vendors money. Second, it means to be free from worries as you use the internet. You should not have to work that you will get hacked, infected, etc.
  
• The orange color. We chose this color to be vibrant and to stand out.
  
• The "blob". Internally we fondly call the orange graphical element "the blob". To me, it is avast (represented by the stylized a in the center) surrounded by people (represented by the four nodes or appendages). There are many logos these days where people have been stylized into shapes like this. Now, this makes great sense as our product is good because of the strength of our community. Our community surrounds us and provides the core of the great detection capabilities of the product. 100 million strong. Now to be honest though, Martin came up with the shape in advance of any message we could weave around it…..but to me it sounds good….
  

So there you have it, the new avast identity. But of course, what really matters are the products. Try them….I am sure you will like them even more.