Twitch has rolled out a new UI update last week and with it comes more channel customization as well as a revamping of their website.
According to their website,”Just over a year ago, we set off on a journey. Our destination: an updated Twitch brand that matches the vibrant energy of our creators and communities, so we could help clear the path on their way to becoming globally recognized icons. And with communities like ours, matching that energy is no small task.
We started with a simple truth: We were born to take on the entertainment industry, in all its forms, to add multiplayer to everything, and to help you, our creators and community members, lead the charge. Creators are at the center of everything that makes Twitch, Twitch and our job is to show up for you, support you, and to shout your names from the rooftops. Not actual rooftops, but you get the idea.
We’ve come a long way and together we’ve built a passionate community of creators who consistently amaze us with their creativity and dedication. We couldn’t be prouder to have helped you create so much, but we know there are a lot of people out in the world who don’t know about Twitch—or may know about Twitch but don’t think it’s for them…yet.
So the next step was clear. We needed to do the work to make everything we’ve created together even better so you can tell your stories to the world. That means a new approach to brand design. One that lets us step back so you can step up.
A whole new approach
Our changes to the brand design system are evolutionary. What Twitch is, where we’ve been, the things our community loves…that stuff is all still here, front and center. (Purple is eternal. Purple is forever.)
Your vibrant communities are what set us apart from the rest of the internet and they’ve created a place that’s always changing, full of spirit, and wholly unique. And there are more of you than ever before.
To empower our communities to create together, we need a new design system that elevates every single person on Twitch. In our marketing on Twitch itself. So we made one. Let’s dive into it.
Upgrading our old friends
Our updated wordmark is designed using the DNA of our old logo, with bold, blocky letterforms that are strong, playful, and inspired by a retro gaming aesthetic.
We also updated Glitch. It’s still our shorthand way of saying ‘Twitch’ and a personification of who we are as a community, so we merely evolved its look. Any brand should worry about retaining some recognizability when updating, but, like, this is Glitch. It’s tattooed on people. We couldn’t change it too much.
To a new purple, and beyond
There is no Twitch without purple. Period. Purple is the only color alive enough to represent our collective creativity, mischievousness, and energy. Our new purple is brighter and more vibrant to match that energy.
Purple did a lot of work to get us to where we are, and while it’s always going to be the star of the show, we thought it deserved some backup. So we’re rounding out our lineup with over two dozen new colors, all nicknamed after iconic games and pop culture characters.
These colors will show up wherever we do: On the site and apps, in our advertising, and anywhere else we need an extra splash of color to maximize our community’s expression. To bring this to life across Twitch, we’re even giving creators a new tool called Creator Color that lets them set a specific color to express themselves and their brand. That color will show up in hover states over thumbnails, on browse pages, and even message notifications in chat.
These colors have all been designed to play nice with Twitch Purple in the form of gradients, so our updated wordmark and glitch can even be tweaked to speak to a specific creator’s personal brand.
type worthy of your voice
For a brand that represents communities with unique and identifiable voices, we never really had a strong typographic identity to match. Conversations and chat at the heart of the Twitch experience, so this was an important thing to get right. When it came time to choose a new typeface, we chose Roobert. A sleek, clean, modern font, with just enough quirkiness.
It’s also modeled off the retro Moog synthesizer logotype, which we thought added a few cool points. While we love the font in its original form, we made some modifications and customizations to ensure it was equally strong across marketing and product design. And when you see it in motion, how it moves should look familiar—a lot like Twitch chat, in fact.
Emotes. Or: Don’t mess with a good thing
Emotes are totally unchanged. Our community gave these beloved characters meaning, and touching them up or trying to align them all under one illustration style really didn’t feel like the right move.
What we are doing is putting emotes into the world off Twitch more often. We’re in a unique position because we have this deep, weird lore to pull from that others simply don’t, and it seemed nuts to try to make emotes less weird. So we didn’t.
Putting it all together for your brand to thrive
One of the best ways to see how all these pieces come together is to dive into Twitch itself. Our product design team took everything about our brand design and its principles and injected them into the Twitch product experience. If our goal is to help our creators tell their stories in new and exciting ways, Twitch itself needs an upgrade. Yes, the typeface, colors, and logos have been updated, but the real work was making the product experience reflect the community itself: powerful, playful, and with your voices coming through loud and clear.”
