Last week Linktree unveiled a new identity designed by Collins & I must admit, it’s a huge improvement from what it used to be. From looking like an add-on for Instagram made by a local developer it now feels like a global product.
The logo is simple, neat & now looks like a tree. While it remains sharp even as a favicon, I am not a huge fan. It’s good, but it feels slightly generic.
But it looks surprisingly fresh when you pair it when their word mark, and here’s why:
It’s almost an unwritten rule when it comes to designing logos that the icon would be placed on the left and the wordmark follows it.
Linktree flips the script on this & chooses to have their icon to the right of their wordmark.
An extremely simple move but it caught me off guard & left me smiling. Such a simple form of differentiation & it just works.
As someone who designs logos for a living, I was surprised that I never tried this with any of my clients in the last 10 years!
Coming to their colors, it’s exactly what you would expect Collins to do. It’s a common signature style you can trace along multiple of their projects from Unilever to CNET: the bold, confident & vibrant palette. And they’ve done it remarkably well once more.
While most brands today stick to one single color (and with good cause, it’s a nightmare to manage multiple colors whether it’s digital or print), Linktree moves ahead confidently with a partner like Collins.
And they don’t just stop at the bold striking colors, their visual design system is looks fresh too.
They use 2D cutouts of images in a 3D space that reveal more when it starts to flip. And this forms the base for their extremely flexible visual system.
This is what Linktree had to say about this:
“Behind every individual creator, there’s a whole world of their content or the things that they’re doing,” Humphreys says.
To honor that, they built a design around the idea of a visual collage that could represent all the pieces of what every creator does. That involved motion and a “visual symphony” of abstract layers. Images flip and move around the screen when you hover over them, expanding and coming back together.
2D layers arranged in a 3D space is such a simple idea that almost every After Effects user would be extremely familiar with. They took such a simple idea & turned it into something incredible.
And it works really well on their website as well: there’s a parallax flip on the images. I was surprised at how solid this feels.
Most good identities fail to show up in all their glory on the web (Read: MI), but this one's just wonderful. I would urge you to go to their website & move your cursor across the images & I am sure you’ll have fun playing with it.
It's things like this that add delight to the mundane & make the people spend just a little more time on a website.
Did I mention they have a new custom typeface? Well, they do! Link Sans, a multi-language typeface which works Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic and Devanagari!
TLDR? It’s unexpected, wild & I love it.