Amazon

Fixing a fractured brand

Amazon was founded on a singular idea: to unlock the power of the internet for commerce. Over the past 30 years, the company has, of course, grown exponentially since the first book sold. It now delivers products, services, and content to customers in nearly every imaginable space and category. And, perhaps inevitably during this time of significant expansion, the Amazon brand became fractured, operationally hard to execute, and key assets were not treated with care. All of this left customers wondering what to expect from the Amazon brand as they moved through the ecosystem, requiring a need for greater simplicity and consistency.

A new logo, with a smile.

We started with the first update to the Amazon logo in over 20 years. The arrow that communicates that Amazon sells everything from “A to Z” is a much loved artifact, but everyone knows that Amazon delivers any item you could possibly need. Our update puts greater emphasis not on the arrow, but on a deeper and more emphatic smile, reflecting Amazon’s mission to delight customers and make their lives easier. So now whether customers are shopping in the Amazon app, getting next-day delivery, watching award-winning content on Prime Video, streaming the latest hits on Amazon Music, or even receiving their prescription at Amazon Pharmacy, they are always met with a smile.

Simplifying the system

Having arrived at the new logo we set about creating a consistent, manageable logo system to deploy across Amazon’s ecosystem.

Historically, teams “moved at the pace of Amazon,” spinning up businesses wherever there was a customer need. Logos were often developed quickly and independently, leading to a fragmented and inconsistent identity.

As part of refining the core logo, we redrew the original letterforms to correct typographic inconsistencies and bring greater precision. From that foundation, we built a complete custom alphabet – Amazon Logo Sans – providing a unified, scalable system for every sub-brand and future initiative.

Today, every logo across the brand is consistent, correct, and built in seconds, helping teams move faster without sacrificing brand integrity.

Bold colors, delivered.

Modernizing the Amazon brand was another of our objectives – and amplifying color was key to this work. First things first: unifying the many oranges across the brand into the orange, Smile Orange. Its bold, vibrant hue matches the energy we were infusing into the brand, dialing up the colors up to 11 while also making them more accessible. Prime now has a more saturated, digital-first blue. And each Amazon sub-brand received the same treatment: expressive, confident, fun colors that match the spirit of Amazon today.

The type that ties it all together

Amazon’s typeface, Ember, was built for Kindle screens – not for a brand that operates in countless physical and digital environments across global markets. But as the company grew teams took on Ember as their own, despite it not being the best fit for their use cases. Often, they ended up mixing in other typefaces to compensate. Our evolved typeface, Ember Modern, was ambitiously designed with purpose. It meets the needs of a global typeface that needs to be bold, playful, and loud in high-impact marketing moments as well as subtle and quiet in more functional moments of the digital experience. The result? A typeface that serves everyone, and is critical in the transformation of the Amazon brand.

From A to Я to あ

In creating Ember Modern, we didn’t just design a beautiful typeface – we built a global tool for creative and operational excellence. At the heart of the Amazon rebrand was the challenge of unifying a company that ships to markets all over the world, and speaks to customers in hundreds of languages. To solve this, Koto partnered with NaN to design a typeface that could thrive across cultures, scripts, and contexts.

The result is a singular typographic system that includes support for 364 languages including English, Japanese, Latin, Cyrillic, and many more. Ember Modern delivers the clarity and consistency of a global brand while allowing for cultural nuance in every region. It’s expressive enough to headline a campaign and legible enough to guide someone through a digital checkout – no matter the market.

A Global Icon’s Global Icons

We developed a comprehensive iconography system to bring consistency, order, and a visual expression of ‘charm and disarm’ to Amazon’s vast ecosystem.

Historically, icons were created independently across teams, products, and regions, leading to a patchwork of styles and visual languages. Built as a global toolkit, Amazon’s icons now follow a single standardized approach – flexible enough to work across every cohort and sub-brand, but unified enough to feel unmistakably Amazon.

Technically, the icons are optimized for every size and touchpoint, performing with equal clarity from billboards to app screens. And like the rest of the identity, the icons are born from Amazon’s most recognizable elements — the smile and Ember Modern

From confusion to cohorts

To help customers better navigate the Amazon ecosystem, the various sub-brands were internally organized into like-minded groups called cohorts. Our job was to consider the fixed points in Amazon’s identity system that would make these cohorts feel like part of the same overall family, and the flex points that would give the sub-brands in each cohort the ability to communicate with their customers appropriately. Our consistent but adaptable identity system allows Amazon to be united when promoting its house brands: bold, confident and expressive for the entertainment cohort; trustworthy and responsible for the health platform; refined, modern, and technical for devices; tasty and fresh for grocery. All while remaining undeniably Amazon.

Meet the parent brand

The core Amazon brand had begun to look a little jaded after 24 years of parenting. Today, customers are so used to finding exactly what they need in the Amazon app and having it delivered at warp speed. We take them for granted, but the truth is, what would we do without Amazon? We wanted to recapture that magical feeling of finding precisely what you need and having it on your doorstep, as soon as you need it.

The refreshed parent brand identity has an air of confidence, reclaiming its importance in customers’ lives. Bold, expressive headlines set in Ember Modern demonstrate a new found assuredness. Heroic product photography is front and center. Hallmark UI elements remind us of the simple power that’s in the palm of our hands.

A house united

Next, we tackled several of the house brands within the Amazon family. Amazon Essentials (clothing), Amazon Basics (household items), Amazon Kids, Amazon for Business, Amazon Autos (yes, they sell cars), and more. In the past each of these brands operated independently, diluting the overall Amazon experience and making it confusing for shoppers to shop. In the new identity system, each brand has its own personality while remaining unified through the use of some of Amazon’s most recognizable assets.

It’s on Prime

The relationship between Amazon and Prime provided one of our key challenges. For many people around the world Amazon Prime serves as the first entry point to the Amazon ecosystem. Are you an Amazon customer, or a Prime member? Our goal became creating a clear role for Prime, which is all about providing access to the very best that Amazon has to offer.

With Prime, every aspect of Amazon is amplified. You can watch your favorite show or movie on Prime Video. You can get household items delivered same-day. You can get your prescription sorted as-soon-as-prime. Naturally, the Prime identity needed to match the Prime impact. The evolution included making Prime as expressive and celebratory as possible, with a bold new look that seamlessly integrates it within every cohort.

So fresh and so green green

For some people who know Amazon as “the everything store,” high-quality, delicious, and curated food might not be the first thing that comes to mind. With our work for Amazon Grocery, we sought to address that challenge with a color palette, photographic style, and graphic system that’s fresh, tasty and food-forward, while still allowing space for value and convenience.

Alexa, so what happened next?

With our work for the Alexa and Devices identity, we showcase a refined, premium range of products that are powered by best-in-class technological innovation. Here a more elevated aesthetic is applied to the product design, packaging, and marketing, showing the flexibility of the brand system once again.

The picture of health

Healthcare is a newer offering for Amazon, and as a new entrant in this category it’s of course particularly important to build trust. Amazon is known for its dependability, and that trait is never more important than when dealing with patient health. So we took a straightforward approach, with clear messaging and a transparent, direct tone. Moments of illustration and photography that show patients living their lives (not spending time at the doctor’s office or filling prescriptions) complement and soften the candid voice.

Amazon. The brand that delivers.

In the first six months following launch, the new brand identity system reached billions of customer touchpoints across 15 global markets – uniting over 50 sub brands under one cohesive, expressive, and flexible design language. Record levels of Prime membership growth, increased cross-category engagement, and Amazon’s strongest brand sentiment scores to date underscored the system’s ability to drive both emotional connection and business performance. By streamlining creative production and accelerating implementation across teams, the system proved that thoughtful, scalable design can power a brand as ambitious and diverse as Amazon – everywhere it shows up, and for every customer it serves.

Thank you

Developing and implementing this new identity system was an enormous undertaking for both the Koto and Amazon teams. It gives us enormous satisfaction to see the brand on posters, boxes, vans, screens, uniforms, warehouses, and race cars around the world.

A massive thank you to everyone at Amazon, and in particular the XCM team who guided the work with their desire for creative excellence, decisiveness, organizational dexterity, collaboration, and an optimism for the impact that brand can have for even the most successful companies.

Thank you also to the team at NaN for their exceptional work in delivering Ember Modern, and to Mari Juliano for the brand photography.