Image via Discord
Discord turned six on Wednesday, and to celebrate its birthday, the instant messaging platform unveiled a new logo complete with an updated typeface, mascot, and shade. Unfortunately, its typographical choice has left users feeling a little blue—or like how Discord now prefers to call it, Blurple.
The antennas of ‘Clyde’, which is supposedly the mascot’s name, have been tweaked to “look a bit more like shoulders,” and he can now express himself through a gamut of facial expressions. The Discord team also replaced its primary faded blue with a deeper ‘Blurple’.
Old logo (above) VS new logo (below). Images via Discord
Despite there being a character icon in the wordmark, fans think much of the character comes from the text in the logo. So when Discord swapped out its all-caps futuristic logomark with a version that includes lowercase letters, it sparked an uproar, as per
Video Games Chronicle.
In fact, when one Twitter user challenged the community to help “
pick a better font,” his tweet prompted over 1,100 comments.
Contrary to what some might believe, Discord
explained that it had “agonized over” the wordmark, which it said was the result of experimentation with “hundreds of different fonts” to perfectly capture the platform’s playfulness. It eventually settled on a custom typeface based on Ginto, a geometric-humanist typeface.
The company elaborated, “The biggest thing that we debated, changed, changed back, changed back again, agonized over… was whether we should keep the wordmark in all caps or in title case… In the end, we decided that Title case — making sure it’s always capitalized like someone’s name — made our new wordmark more legible.”
Image via Discord
Image via Discord
Image via Discord
[via
Video Games Chronicle, images via
Discord]