Xiaomi's Kenya Hara logo redesign: 3 years of work, one n=3 curve, 170M Weibo reads

On March 30, 2021, Xiaomi opened its tenth-anniversary spring product launch with the announcement of a new logo designed by Kenya Hara, the Japanese designer who serves as MUJI's art director. Lei Jun admitted the change looked like simply rounding the corners of the old square mark, then spent more than 20 minutes arguing the opposite: the shape and the brand's inner spirit had both changed.

Hara's concept was 'Alive' — technology, he said, evolves toward the forms of life, so the identity should feel living rather than static. To justify the new outline he showed 24 shapes between a square and a circle, derived from the superellipse equation, and explained that the n=3 case struck the perfect balance. The M and logotype were redrawn, black and silver were added to the orange, and the logo was demonstrated moving fluidly across products and scenes.

The near-invisible change became the story itself. The Weibo topic around the new logo exceeded 170 million reads while the launch event's own topic sat near 5 million, and commenters competed to mock the reportedly ¥2 million fee. Advertising critics counter-argued that Xiaomi had bought a story, not a shape, and the debate ran across design and business media for weeks — turning a routine rebrand into a national conversation about what design is worth.