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Nvidia changed its corporate logo over a weekend in August 2006, without much announcement. Neowin noticed it on 15 August and found that the new design had not yet been processed in the US trademark database.

The eye symbol, a green swirl around a pupil, stayed but was simplified from green, white and black to green and white. The bigger change was the name. The old logo set it as nVIDIA, with a lowercase n and a serif, italic treatment, even though, as Neowin pointed out, the company had changed its official trademark to all capitals several years earlier. The new wordmark is a bold, upright sans serif in capitals.

Germany's Hartware reported the same day that Nvidia had changed several of its logos without drawing attention to it. The corporate mark was the most affected, losing its italic n, though strictly speaking the letter was still lowercase, simply less set apart from the rest of the name. The SLI logo and other product marks were refreshed at the same time.

The change brought the logo into line with how the company actually wrote its name. It was the kind of correction most people would not notice, and few did.

Hartware, the German hardware site, noted that the company quietly changed several logos without drawing any attention to it. The corporate mark was lightly reworked and lost its italic n; strictly the letter was still lowercase, it simply no longer stood apart from the rest of the name. The SLI logo and other product marks were refreshed at the same time. Slipping a rebrand out without announcement is unusually modest, and the quieter wordmark, with the n no longer leaning away from its neighbours, reads as one name rather than a letter plus a word.

The interesting part is what Nvidia kept. Rather than invent a new symbol, it left the eye's shape alone and only removed a colour, and fixed the one element that was actually wrong. That is the right instinct for a brand whose symbol was already well known: correct the inconsistency, keep the equity, and skip the launch event.