Duolingo Logo Redesign
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 hasn’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, we decided to give our logo some careful – yet significant – updates.
When the company was first founded in 2011, Duolingo’s Cofounder and CTO Severin Hacker famously declared “I don’t much care what you do in terms of style, but please don’t use green. I hate green.” so Duolingo’s Cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn asked that the logo be an owl (for knowledge), but he expressly requested that it be made green, purely to annoy Severin.

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.





Until now, designers had been left to create their own logos for new products, resulting in brand fragmentation and internal confusion on which logo to use and when. A custom font was created for internal use only based on the new logo, finally allowing designers to simply type out product logos in multiple weights and in a consistent format.


A complete identity system was designed to eliminate inconsistencies and finally bring all of Duolingo’s product logos together under one brand identity framework.









The controversial billboard was impossible to miss for the thousands of tech workers forced to sit in hours of slow moving traffic during rush hour every day, and encouraged them to quit the Bay Area and move to a city where they can walk to work, and afford to buy a home.

The Posters are printed locally in Pittsburgh PA, using a digital press on Every Satin at 18×24″, to be framed and hung at various places at Duolingo HQ.







Thanks to Tyler Murphy, Luis von Ahn, Gregory Hartman and Severin Hacker.