What is going on in marketing?
I understand that some changes are necessary to keep things fresh and appealing, but the new name, Linearity Curve, leaves me scratching my head. If the intention was to simplify the name to broaden appeal and scope, they’ve done the exact opposite. In fact, it’s even more of a mouthful than the original! Now we’re up to 5 syllables for the brand and 6 if you count the app itself.
My students have been using Vectornator in their daily design projects, and while the app’s functionality remains fantastic, the cumbersome new name has had some interesting results I just wanted to pass along. Instead of embracing it, they’ve resorted to calling it the “pen app” just to avoid struggling with the long-winded name. This not only undermines the effort put into the rebranding but also creates confusion when trying to differentiate between various apps in their conversations.
Moreover, the branding emphasizes “Linearity,” but the app itself is simply called “Curve” on our iPads. This inconsistency adds unnecessary complexity when trying to locate the app or communicate whether we mean the app, or the function of using the pen tool to create a curve. It’s an extra step that is both frustrating and time-consuming, especially in an educational setting where efficiency matters.
As if the naming issue wasn’t enough, finding relevant tutorials has just become almost impossible. . In the past, searching for Vectornator tutorials yielded plenty of results catering specifically to our app. However, with the rebrand, we now have to contend with the generic term “Curve,” leading to search results flooded with tutorials for 3D blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Inkscape and literally every other vector based software with bigger user base than us. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and honestly, there’s no way we are going to out SEO giants like adobe and autodesk this early into Linearity’s growth stage.
Consider this common scenario: A student wants to know how to duplicate a shape or create a straight edge in the app. Before, they could search for “How to duplicate a shape in Vectornator” or “Creating a straight edge in Vectornator,” and they’d find what they needed. Now, with the name change, even simple queries like “How to duplicate a shape in Curve” will become drowned in irrelevant results from other software even once we start growing our user-generated tutorial ecosystem.
Like….try it.
“How do I align a text in curve?”
“How do I make a straight edge in curve?”
“How do I stop a pen tool from making a curve in curve?”
I appreciate that the company may have had reasons for the rebrand, but I can’t help but feel like they haven’t fully considered the impact on their marketability and userbase. A change like this should have improved our experience, not made it more challenging.
Obviously the rollout already happened and there’s no reverting it, so just wanted to put out another data point from a large educational institutional group and communicate that vectornator has become “pen app” in our local vernacular.
the recent Producthunt launch