Late last week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its open-source chatbot called DeepSeek-V3, a product that has some tech analysts describing the company’s efforts as “a shot across the bow at the U.S. tech world.” DeepSeek-V3 performs similarly to chatbots like ChatGPT-4o and Meta’s Llama—despite being created in just a few months, being trained on inferior hardware, and requiring a reported budget of just $6 million. (ChatGPT spent $100 million on its latest iteration alone.) The news caused the Nasdaq to tumble by $1 trillion yesterday as markets reacted to the success of the lower-cost LLM challenger.

But the visual representation of this industry disruptor is not a swirling black-void logo à la OpenAI, or even a robot. Instead, it’s a friendly blue whale. This diverges from branding trends currently dominating the AI industry, which lean into abstract design and increasingly rigid, tech-inspired aesthetics. By bucking those trends, DeepSeek is offering consumers a new point of view on how an AI company might conduct and represent itself.

DeepSeek’s logo makes a splash

DeepSeek’s logo is a plump, bright blue whale that almost appears to be jumping across the screen. It’s accompanied by the brand’s wordmark in a rounded, fractured sans-serif font. The overall visual identity creates an air of approachability and friendliness that makes the brand stand out.

That’s because there’s been a “lack of personality and joy” in tech-industry branding over the past several years, according to designer Martin Grasser, who created Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo back in 2012.

“We’ve seen this homogenization of design when you look across tech companies,” Grasser says, adding that he doesn’t see identity design as “a big differentiator” in the current tech environment. He notes that the tech sector has undergone a stark branding evolution from the playful and humanist approach of the aughts to more grandiose visual storytelling. “Now we have Uber, Meta, Tesla, X—we’ve really taken this turn toward technology as the answer,” he says.

Grasser says he was “charmed” by DeepSeek’s logo, as well as the concept behind it.

The brand is a WIP, but “evokes imagination”

While DeepSeek hasn’t openly explained its design choices, when we asked the company’s chatbot about the logo, it replied that the mark “likely symbolizes depth, intelligence, and exploration—qualities that align with the company’s focus on AI and deep learning.”

The choice of a whale works on several symbolic levels, according to Teemu Suviala, chief creative officer at Landor. “There are many cultures that associate whales with wisdom, power, and prosperity,” he says. “Seeing a whale [is] an omen of good things to come in many cultures.”

Suviala adds that the concept of a whale navigating the ocean is a strong metaphor for DeepSeek’s users. “The concept of navigating is probably connected to the open-source nature of DeepSeek that is somewhat different from the competition,” he says.

Suviala and Grasser agree that there’s still plenty of work to be done on DeepSeek’s branding, both noting that the whale’s eye becomes lost at a small scale. Grasser believes the brand’s typography doesn’t quite fit with its friendly, optimistic logo, as the fracturing creates a “nervous” feeling. Suviala called out the inconsistent kerning.

Such inconsistencies could be due to the nature of startup branding. Ross Clugston, an independent creative director, says that in the U.S., most startups tend to hold off on investing in branding until “they have matured and need to signal to investors they are serious about making profit.”

Clugston points to Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok, noting that “all of their early branding efforts fell drastically short” of the actual product they were building. “Logos with animals are usually reserved for more playful tech pastimes like Twitter, Mailchimp, Tripadvisor, Evernote,” he says. “I think this is a conscious effort [by DeepSeek] to be nonthreatening.”

Still, DeepSeek’s unexpected branding is a first building block toward establishing an AI company that opts to distinguish itself from the competition rather than blending in.

“It evokes imagination and the unknown, and that’s cool,” Grasser says. “It’s nice to hear from somebody who’s curious, as opposed to omnipresent or hovering above you.”

Will this design disruptor have staying power?

Over the past several years, dominant AI companies have embraced a few key graphic icons that have come to define the space at large.

There are the minimalist, robot-inspired logos, as those from Replika, Jasper AI, and Enzyme. There’s the abstract, swirling hexagon that’s come to define giants like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Stability AI. The secondary sparkle icon has been used by companies as far-ranging as OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and Grammarly to suggest the presto magic of their AI tools.

As AI has become more powerful, it seems Big Tech companies have focused more on signaling that they’re part of the industry-shaking, boundary-breaking AI “club” than actually distinguishing their own brand identities. And the more ingrained these tropes become in consumers’ minds, the more incentive there is for new AI companies to go with the flow and bank on established visual associations.

Taken alongside the sector’s existing logos, DeepSeek’s mascot-adjacent approach is a pretty big risk. Whether the play actually succeeds, Suviala notes, will come down to how the company conducts itself in the coming months—including whether the product experience itself and the company’s communication style aligns with its friendly exterior.

“I would venture as far as to say that DeepSeek is and was always going to terrify Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and government regulators,” Clugston says. “So it’s strategically sound to make the logo a cute little whale.”