Design agency Koto has collaborated with online retailer Amazon‘s design team Amazon XCM in a rebrand of the company’s distinct smile logo, while simplifying the identity of over 50 Amazon sub-brands.
The rebrand is the first major overhaul for Amazon in over 20 years since its 1994 founding. The exercise focused on organising “fractured” branding assets that had developed independently while the company grew at a rapid pace.
“As Amazon scaled at extraordinary speed, the brand system sometimes struggled to deliver creative excellence at speed, fragmented across teams, regions, and experiences,” said Koto.
“We built a new brand system that elevates Amazon’s most iconic assets: a warmer smile, a modernized logo, a flexible new typeface, a unified color palette, and a global architecture designed to move at the pace of Amazon.”
Similar to a recent branding update by Walmart, Koto and Amazon XCM took a subtle approach to updating the brand’s logo – a curved arrow and smile hybrid that represents Amazon’s “A to Z” offerings.
Compared to the previous logo, the team expanded the shaft and point of the symbol, and rendered it in a saturated, custom tangerine orange, dubbed Smile Orange.
“Our update puts greater emphasis not on the arrow, but on a deeper and more emphatic smile, reflecting Amazon’s mission to delight customers and make their lives easier,” said Koto.
The update also included creating a custom font for its many logos, called Amazon Logo Sans, which was rolled out across sub-brands such as Amazon Smile, Amazon Cash, Amazon Echo and Amazon Jobs.
The sans-serif font is strikingly similar to the previous, although the spurs of the “a” were pulled downwards and straightened.
The team also updated Amazon’s typeface, Ember, originally developed for its e-reader brand Kindle, to be used across different use-cases.
“As the company grew, teams took on Ember as their own, despite it not being the best fit for their use cases,” said Koto. “Our evolved typeface, Ember Modern, was ambitiously designed with purpose.”
“It meets the needs of a global typeface that needs to be bold, playful, and loud in high-impact marketing moments as well as subtle and quiet in more functional moments of the digital experience.”
This also included working with design agency NAN to render the typeface in 364 languages to accommodate Amazon’s global market.
Other updates across the company included rolling out “expressive, confident, fun colours that match the spirit of Amazon” and introducing unified iconography with a specific focus on Prime, Amazon Grocery, Alexa and Amazon One Medical, its healthcare brand.
According to Koto, the project took a total of 18 months.
“Developing and implementing this new identity system was an enormous undertaking for both the Koto and Amazon teams,” said the studio.
“It gives us enormous satisfaction to see the brand on posters, boxes, vans, screens, uniforms, warehouses, and race cars around the world.”
Other recent brand refreshes include a largely unchanged “spark” motif for Walmart and a revamped logo for Honda for its electric vehicle line.
The images are courtesy of Koto Studio unless otherwise stated
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