Amazon's Fragmented Brand Gets More Than a Fresh Coat of Paint

This brand refresh has captured me all week. Go take a look if you haven't. There's enough quality in there to pull from for a long time. Lessons on craft, thoughtfulness, what a brand even is. But most important is the self-awareness to understand they can't pull it off themselves. Amazon have worked with Koto to reel all of their products in and unify their expression.

Unifying a fractured brand is hard, doing it internally is impossible

The above mess is the result of decades of design drift. They share a logo, some colors, and that's about it. Without the logo or the literal word "Amazon" you'd have no idea you were even looking at the same multinational brand.

I think about it from the perspective of a software engineer involved in decisions like these. Thousands of people were attached to one part or another of these designs, or their implementations. Teams begin to identify with the ways in which they're distinct.

It doesn't surprise me Amazon went external to solve the problem. They didn't have a unified brand - where would they even go internally to solve a problem like that?

But, working with Koto, what they've accomplished is incredible.

This is the brand—not just the logo or name, but the full visual and emotional system. And front and center is its beautiful, adaptive font.

An Updated Typeface

The benefit of bringing everything together under one typeface is immediate. Just look at how versatile it is:

Ember Modern Text is stunning, and I think that's entirely because of its roots as a font for e-ink displays. Ember was always meant to be read. Ember Modern Text is meant to be read anywhere, at any size, in any language, on any display.

I'm going to be making a habit of not concluding these properly. I just wanted to call out how much I adore this. We strive for this, many of us, in our day jobs.

I do wonder if it's on the decline–the caring about quality / craft. The trading up of principles for profit. But if one of the largest, most disjointed brands on the planet can find a way back to it then there's still some hope out there for the rest of us.