Twitch (2019)Copied

Twitch rolled out its new look in September 2019, eight years after launch and ahead of TwitchCon North America. The Verge summed up the old identity as blocky and very 2011, and the job was to bring it up to date without losing a brand that some fans had literally tattooed on themselves.

It followed what executive creative director Byron Phillipson called a period of soul searching, about a year of work. Director of consumer comms Joel Johnson told Creative Review everything at Twitch had been created in real time and added on piece by piece. Creative director Sam Johnson explained the team ended up with four wordmarks and doubled down on the blocky, extruded letterforms it felt it owned; the extended palette ran to 24 colours nicknamed after games and pop culture, such as Sonic and Pac.

It is an evolution. The logo keeps its quirky, pixelated shape, now cleaner and sleeker, and the familiar blinking Glitch character stays. The famous purple was updated, and around it sit about 20 new colours. The new typeface is Roobert, which The Verge notes is based on the lettering of the Moog synthesizer, and Twitch's director of design systems said it was chosen with accessibility in mind. Streamers could also pick their own accent colour to highlight their channels and directory listings.

The identity was developed by COLLINS together with Twitch's in-house design team, and the launch was backed by a large ad campaign starring some of the platform's biggest streamers.

The community response split by context. At TwitchCon, Phillipson later said in an Adobe MAX talk with Brian Collins, merchandise sold faster than ever and could not be restocked fast enough. On the site itself, TheGamer reported users angry about the new font and a dark mode some found harder on the eyes.

Critics were mostly warm. Designer Tobias van Schneider argued that in a year of cookie-cutter sans-serif logos the new Twitch proved brands could still have personality. That is the right read: Twitch chose to keep its odd, internet-native mark and gave it a proper system, rather than flattening it into another tech wordmark.