Jakarta, 2010.

Gojek takes its name from the ojek, the motorcycle taxi found on street corners across Indonesia. The business began in Jakarta in 2010 with 20 motorcycle drivers and a call centre, according to Wikipedia, which names Nadiem Makarim and Michaelangelo Moran as its co-founders. Makarim was a regular ojek passenger, Wikipedia says, and noticed that drivers spent much of their day waiting for fares while passengers wasted time walking around looking for a free driver. The company was set up to connect the two.

The early system was manual. The Jakarta Post reported in July 2019 that Gojek began as a call centre whose operators took orders from customers and then contacted drivers one by one until somebody accepted the job, with the whole operation running on spreadsheets. The original services were courier delivery and two-wheeled rides.

The app changed that. Gojek launched its mobile application in January 2015, Wikipedia says, with four services: GoRide, GoSend, GoShop and GoFood. The Jakarta Post described the 2015 launch as the year that transformed the company, as the app brought transport, food and package delivery together with an automated system for matching orders to drivers. The “Go” prefix became the naming pattern for almost everything that followed, from payments to cleaning and car services, and gave the company a family of product names that all point back to the parent brand.

Moran had a particular role in how that brand looked. Besides serving as brand director, Wikipedia says, he designed the company’s original logo and shaped its branding. That mark showed a rider on a motorcycle, which made sense for a company whose drivers wore its name on their jackets in traffic. The name itself was long written in capitals with a hyphen, as GO-JEK; the current spelling is a single lower-case word, “gojek”, with a dotless j.

A logo without a motorcycle.

By 2019 the motorcycle no longer described the business. On 22 July 2019, its ninth anniversary, Gojek unveiled a new logo, The Jakarta Post reported, as a sign of how far the company had spread from ojek rides into payments, shopping, beauty and cleaning services. Wikipedia gives the same date and says the icon was nicknamed “Solv”.

The new symbol drops the vehicle. There is no more motorcycle in the logo, The Jakarta Post said; instead the mark is meant to suggest a map pin, a motorcycle wheel and an overhead view of a driver straddling a motorcycle. The idea of the rider stays, but only as an abstraction: a round form that reads as a location marker on a map and as a wheel at the same time. The newspaper spelled the nickname “Solve”; the company’s own spelling, Solv, is the one Wikipedia uses.

The company explained the change in terms of the people it now had to serve. “Go-Jek has changed so much from its beginnings,” Makarim told The Jakarta Post. “We have to accommodate various service providers, merchants, payment systems and other [stakeholders].” Co-founder Kevin Aluwi told the paper that, for all its services, Gojek essentially did three things: moving people, moving things and moving money.

The same day brought a visible change on the street. A photograph in The Jakarta Post’s coverage the next day showed drivers wearing jackets with the new logo. Wikipedia says the icon was meant to symbolise the shift from a ride-hailing service to a super app offering many ways to remove everyday hassles. The services kept multiplying after the rebrand: in 2020, Wikipedia says, Gojek launched GoStore, a tool to help micro, small and medium-sized businesses set up online shops, under the same “Go” prefix.

Founders, icons and merged names.

Company identities in Asia often grow out of a single founder group or family holding, and the corporate mark has to cover businesses as varied as refining, retail, telecoms and software. The name tends to stay fixed while the symbol beside it is redrawn as the group changes shape, so one logo can sit above many trading names at once.

For app-first businesses the logo and the app icon are frequently the same object. A mark that must read at the size of a fingertip on a crowded phone screen is drawn as a simple, closed shape in one strong colour, and the full wordmark is reserved for larger formats such as signage, delivery bags and helmets.

Campaign naming built on calendar dates, in which a day and month repeated as numbers become the name of a sales event, is a recurring pattern in regional e-commerce. The date itself works as a brand asset that can be printed, counted down and repeated each year.

Mergers and new holding structures are a common trigger for redesign. A combined group may add a new parent name above existing consumer brands, or redraw a symbol to signal a shift from a single service to a wider platform, while keeping familiar colours so that customers still recognise the product.

From Gojek to GoTo.

Two years after the new logo, Gojek gained a parent name. On 17 May 2021, Gojek and the Indonesian e-commerce company Tokopedia announced a merger of their businesses, creating a group called GoTo, Reuters reported in a story carried by Kontan that day. The report said both companies had been founded about ten years earlier and were combining their services under a single platform. Gojek’s chief executive, Andre Soelistyo, was to lead the combined business as GoTo’s chief executive, and Tokopedia’s president, Patrick Cao, was to become GoTo’s president.

The new name is a compound of the two. Wikipedia’s entry on the group gives its full company name as PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk, trading as GoTo, and says it was formed in 2021. Tokopedia had been founded in 2009 by William Tanuwijaya and Leontinus Alpha Edison, the same entry says. The parent name joins the “Go” of Gojek to the “To” of Tokopedia, and the two consumer names sit beneath it.

Gojek also took its name abroad. Wikipedia says the company started ride-hailing in Singapore on 10 January 2019, and today lists Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines among the countries where it has operated. In July 2021, Wikipedia adds, AirAsia agreed to acquire Gojek’s Thai business in an all-stock deal. Makarim left the company in 2019, the GoTo entry says.

For a design guide, Gojek shows how a logo can trade a literal picture of the product for a symbol that stretches across many services, while a naming prefix holds a family of products together. Compare Grab, its ride-hailing neighbour, and Singtel, another regional brand that redrew its identity as its business widened. For this guide we use green, a deep green and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gojek’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.