Yes it looks like it is "updated", and that is because
most modern things are soulless representations of their prior art.
Canonical rolled out yet another attempt at recreating itself.
It wants to sell you things, and it is a closely knit business-first venture.
It has little to nothing to do with what UBPorts is doing.
It wasn't so much that they tried to find somewhere new to go, they were already there
and the logo didn't match.
Their own guidelines say to use colours to represent community. Their colour is orange.
This means the community is around the project, not inside of it. Again a question of alignment.
The newest logo looks looks left-aligned by mistake, which was a smaller problem in the first attempt to recreate it.
The square and negative space logo is already out of date.
It is a cheap trick to get as much real-estate out of available (often square) space available.
It works if you can own the colour, and it is a question of making sure "brand awareness" hits often and hard. No elegance to it at all. Not saying it doesn't work, but that is what it is.
Rip away the gimmicks and it is evident how poor an attempt it is.
The newest logo has no acuity.
There is now what looks like a compound curve because of the edge smoothing next to the faces, which is the entire thing to avoid in the first place.
This happens when you don't understand design, and you don't understand the design you are working with.
The size diminishes, it is harder to make out, and the air and composition of the elements are now gone.
Without the stopgap logo in between, the same generational corruption is now total.
It is pretty bad when a stock-logo when searching for "three people in circle logo" is better than two attempts at changing something that worked.
alt text
Logically the next iteration will be three people leaning all the way in for a time-out pep-talk amongst themselves.
That or they understand to make the hands two smaller balls at each side, so it looks like someone is actually holding hands and not hunched over each-other.
Or the circle gets fatter, and it is just cut-outs for heads in two curved cutouts for each head.
Effectively the "hands" just grow, to the same width as the original logo.
My money is on this one since it has even less entropy, and in less than 5 years.