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Prime Video by 2023 had to cover everything from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Boys to The Rings of Power and weekly Thursday Night Football. Its identity needed to flex across action, drama, comedy and sport, and adapt to different global markets.

The idea is in a detail most people never notice: the dimple at the end of the Amazon smile. The refresh uses that dimple as a device to move viewers through a ripple of content. The colour is a bright Prime Blue taken from the wider Prime palette. A new proprietary typeface was drawn for the brand, and a set of illustrated icons animate alongside the type as small in-jokes for fans. The identity launched with a redesigned Prime Video app that made content easier to find.

The identity was led by Pentagram partner Emily Oberman, a credit given by both Design Week and Creative Bloq. Pentagram commissioned the Sharp Type foundry to cut Prime Video Sharp, a customised Sharp Grotesk with expressive ink traps, and illustrators at a Dutch studio drew the Iconics, a set of genre symbols from vampire fangs to the rings of Middle-earth. Two visual modes switch between bright Prime Blue for pop culture and darker tones for drama, and the dimple doubles as a portal in end-of-promo idents.

Pentagram framed the strategy as positioning Prime Video as a rabbit hole of entertainment. The design press admired the reuse of the smile; one Design Week reader found the Iconics less sophisticated than the typeface.

Creative Review set the refresh against its market. Prime Video had 200 million subscribers but no captive audience, with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Apple TV+ chasing the same viewers, and as streamers became studios many had adopted a more serious, awards season image. Pentagram's work, the magazine argued, went the other way, back to the lighthearted side of entertainment, a quality the studio itself called charmingly nerdy. That is the best argument for the Iconics: in a category that keeps dressing up, a brand willing to wink at fans stands out.

Using the dimple is a smart, ownable choice: it ties Prime Video to Amazon without putting the full smile on every screen. The system feels confident and flexible. The weakness is that, like most streaming brands, it will be seen mainly as a tile on a TV home screen, where the subtleties disappear and only the blue and the wordmark survive.