The wordmark lost its voice
The 2021 move to a modified Ginto Nord in capitals made the logotype stronger but more generic. At launch, most of the community feedback was about the font.
Concept rebrand · SoftwareUnofficial · not affiliated with Discord
DiscordSay it here
Software
Discord is where your people already talk. "Say it here" turns the letter d into a speech bubble mid-sentence, makes the green speaking ring part of the identity, and lets blurple share the stage.
- Company
- Discord (unofficial concept)
- Sector
- Voice, video and text communities
- Scope
- Critique, mark, custom wordmark, palette, type, applications
- Status
- Self-initiated study, not a commission
01
What isn't working
Discord's 2021 refresh made the brand sturdier for a company growing past gaming. Some of the trade-offs show.
One colour carries everything
Blurple shifted from #7289DA to the more saturated #5865F2. Almost all recognition now sits on that one colour plus the mascot, and the secondary colours never made it into the brand.
The best parts aren't in the identity
What people love about the product (voice rooms, the green ring when someone speaks, server icons) is absent from the brand. The mascot's face still reads as a game controller while the company courts every kind of community.
Sources: The FPS Review: "Nobody seems to like Discord's new logo" · VGC on the 2021 logo reaction · Discord blog: Happy Blurpthday
02
The idea
Say it here
“A letter halfway through a sentence.”
The mark is a lowercase d whose stem flicks out into a speech-bubble tail, so the letter is mid-sentence. The same d closes the custom wordmark. The green "speaking" ring from voice chat becomes the graphic device: concentric rings for motion, avatars and campaign art. Iris, a slightly warmer and lighter blurple, keeps continuity, with Voice green and Ping red as named partners. Discord's mascot is deliberately neither used nor redrawn.
Unofficial concept · not affiliated with Discord
03
Logo
Primary lockup, the mark on its own, one-colour and reversed versions. Every file is hand-built SVG: outlined, geometric, no effects.
Primary
Reversed
Mark
One colour
Mark, reversed
One colour lockup
04
Construction
Drawn on a grid, not traced. Measurements are in grid units of the 120-unit master.
- Bowl r44 and counter r19 share a centre, so the stroke is even all the way round.
- Stem is 26 units, a hair heavier than the 25-unit ring so it holds its own optically.
- The tail is two cubic curves leaving the stem at 92 and landing past the baseline, like the tail of a chat bubble.
- The closing d of the wordmark is the mark itself, scaled to Bricolage Grotesque's ascender.
- Wordmark: Bricolage Grotesque ExtraBold at opsz 96, tracking −8.
05
Colour
Contrast ratios are measured against white and black text, so the safe pairings are listed on each swatch.
Aa 5.4:1AA
Aa 5.4:1AA
Aa 19.2:1AA
Aa 12.8:1AA
Aa 6.5:1AA
Aa 18.8:1AA
Rough proportions in a typical layout.
06
Type
Open-licence fonts only (SIL OFL), embedded from local files.
Display
Bricolage Grotesque
Bricolage Grotesque · opsz 96 · wght 800
Your people are already talking.
Aa Bb Cc Gg Kk Qq Rr 0123456789 & ?!
Text
Bricolage Grotesque
Bricolage Grotesque · opsz 14 · wght 400 to 600
Servers for your friends, your fandom, your study group. Drop in to voice, stay for the chat. Leave when you like.
Label
Bricolage Grotesque Caps
Bricolage Grotesque · opsz 12 · tracked caps for labels
4 in voice · late-night-art
07
Usage
X is the stem width. Keep 1X clear around the mark and the lockup; the tail counts as part of the mark.
Clear space
XX
Minimum size
- Lockup
- 100 px wide · 22 mm.
- Mark
- 16 px · 4 mm. Below 20 px, drop the counter to r21 to stop it filling in.
08
Applications
Every mockup is built for this study and labelled as an unofficial concept. Product names, people and content shown are invented.
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