Duolingo Logo

While creating Duolingo’s new Design Guidelines, I decided it was finally time to update our logo. The wordmark appears millions of times a day as users open the Duolingo app to learn a new language for free, yet it hadn’t been touched since we were a 5 person startup. Now, with more than 100 employees and operating at a scale far greater than we ever imagined, it was time to give our logo some careful – yet significant – updates.

The original wordmark had been modified to accentuate the ‘L’ and ‘G’ characters, for fear they would be misread otherwise. The result was a logo that was more often than not read as ‘DuoLingo’, leading to our name being constantly misspelled in the media and by users. The new logo was redrawn from scratch to be more geometric, balanced, and confident, while retaining it’s most identifiable characteristics.

This update didn't roll out everywhere - and we're still working on evolving our branding, but I'm happy with how this turned out. Our biggest hope? That users wouldn't notice at all - but we would.