If your social media feeds are anything like mine, yesterday you were bombarded with news of Amazon’s “brand transformation” by Koto. It’s a huge piece of work, driven by the company’s struggles “to deliver creative excellence at speed, fragmented across teams, regions, and experiences.” Across the main Amazon brand and more than 50 sub-brands, from Prime to Alexa, Koto describes its new work as “confident, considered and consistent.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/01_Hero.mp4 It is a huge and multi-faceted undertaking from Koto’s New York team, with interconnecting elements that combine to form a cohesive whole. For the first time in 20 years, Amazon has updated its logo, initially designed by Turner Duckworth. Koto shifted the focus from the arrow to the smile, which it has made “deeper and more empathetic” and they have redrawn the letterforms of the wordmark “to correct typographic inconsistencies and bring greater precision.” Koto also created Amazon Logo Sans, a custom alphabet to unify the way type is used across its logos. A big part of the project seems to have been eliminating inconsistencies across the way the Amazon brand shows up. Jeff Bezos’ company famously moves quickly, and this can lead to design work being done on the hoof to meet pressing deadlines. So with colours, the Amazon orange had become a whole host of similar shades, which Koto has brought into a single hue, Smile Orange. They also gave Prime “a more saturated and digital-first blue.” Koto’s new Ember Modern typeface for Amazon They evolved Amazon’s Ember typeface – originally designed for Kindle screens – into Ember Modern. Again consistency is key – the Koto team found that different Amazon designers were “mixing in other typefaces to compensate” for Ember’s shortcomings. They also worked with Berlin type foundry NaN to tailor the typeface for every market and culture Amazon operates in – which is basically everywhere. Icons – can I shock you – were previously often “created independently across teams, products, and regions, leading to a patchwork of styles and visual languages.” And so again the Koto team introduced a global toolkit to produce “a single, standardised approach.” Koto also had to make sense of more than 50-sub-brands. Some of them are very familiar, many others I’d bet you’ve never heard of (Amazon Catalyst anyone?) They created a new brand architecture, grouping them into cohorts – like entertainment, health and devices – each of which would then have a shared visual approach overlaying their individual identities. Koto’s new work for Amazon For the parent brand, which Koto said had become “a little jaded” they brought in “bold expressive headlines, hero product photography and hallmark UI elements” to elevate and reenergise it. If the work feels quite familiar, then it probably is. After an 18-month project, the work started to roll-out eight months ago, and can already be seen across packaging, delivery vans, staff uniforms and various digital touchpoints. At the moment, neither Koto nor Amazon are giving interviews about the project – they are directing press to the (admittedly great) case study on the Koto website. But there is one fascinating angle to this, shared by Koto’s New York managing director, Alex Monger. “I’ll never forget how we won the project,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “An initial call on a Monday. A pitch by Thursday. And just a few hours after presenting, a phone call to say we’d won it.” This simple sentence is worth considering in full. At the time of writing Amazon is worth $1.99 trillion. It employs somewhere in the region of 1.3 million people. Its brand touches billions of people, all around the world, in myriad ways. This work had to be signed off at the very highest level – Monger says that one of Koto’s New York conference rooms is named after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, to commemorate the call when they heard he had approved the work. Koto’s new Amazon logo And yet it took just four days from Amazon approaching Koto to commissioning them. That is staggering, even for a company that is notoriously decisive and quick to move. So many designers talk of the challenges created by slow clients, dithering and delays. In closing Thomas Matthews after 28 years, co-founder Sophie Thomas cited this hesitancy as one of the main factors. She called on clients to “remember we are people” on the other end of the phone, and to understand what impact these delays can have on independent businesses. In an uncertain economic climate, where budgets and client confidence seem to be shrinking, pace seems to have slowed across the board, and design studios are suffering. But clients are frustrated too. This Fortune article explains why many top CEOs have become “simplifiers-in-chief” – changing cultures and structures with the aim of “blowing up bureaucracy to move faster” It cites a Bain & Co study which suggests that “excessive complexity” costs firms up to 15% of their annual profits. One of the examples it gives of a company that exemplifies this approach? Amazon. And this project speaks to that. One of the world’s biggest and most complex companies took four days between contacting a design studio for a massive, business-critical project and giving them the job. This should shake everyone out of their torpor. In business, as in dating, a quick no is useful. A quick yes is transformative. Koto’s new work for Amazon https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/05_Color.mp4 Koto’s new icons for Amazon https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/08_Typography_Sizzle.mp4 Koto’s new work for Amazon https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/04/06_Logo_System.mp4