LinktreeCopied

In June 2022 Linktree, the company that pioneered the link-in-bio tool, unveiled a redesign. Its own announcement said the original 2016 design had carried the brand to more than 24 million users, but the company needed something future-focused, flexible and able to tell many different stories. The work was led internally alongside the design agency COLLINS, which Tubefilter noted is well known for its work with Spotify.

Tubefilter described the new image as defined by bright colours, a signature sans-serif font and a focus on connectivity, and observed clear similarities to Spotify's visual design, with pops of colour and big letters. Linktree said the biggest difference was a focus on people and the personas of its audience: the old design represented the product's simple function, the new one puts creators first.

The details are practical. A custom typeface, Link Sans, was designed for optimal accessibility across languages so it can sit alongside other scripts with minimal interference. The palette is powerful, opinionated and expressive, grounded by the brand colour Canopy green, with all combinations meeting AA accessibility standards. B&T framed the redesign as recreating Linktree's identity through a series of fresh tools and features.

The Spotify comparison is fair, and not entirely a compliment. Loud colour and huge type have become the default language of creator platforms, so Linktree looks current rather than singular.

Linktree's own blog told the story of its typeface. Co-founder Nick Humphreys, a designer who led the redesign, liked browsing new Linktrees in his spare time and found a just signed up account from ATS Type, a foundry in Melbourne, where Linktree is based. That chat led to Link Sans, a typeface built to sit alongside Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic and Devanagari scripts. Finding your type designer among your own users is a nice piece of brand mythology, and for a product used worldwide, a multilingual typeface is a practical decision rather than a decorative one.

But the accessibility work is real, and a typeface built for many scripts is a serious commitment for a product used around the world. The identity fits the business: it is a frame for other people's content, not the content itself.