If you noticed that Spotify looks a little bit more dynamic than usual today, it’s not your imagination. The streaming platform just debuted a brand-new custom typeface called Spotify Mix—and it’s a genre-bending fusion of font styles, line weights, and unexpected details.
The typeface was created in partnership with Berlin-based foundry Dinamo Typefaces over the course of a year and a half. Spotify plans to roll out the change over the coming months, which will include updating the company’s wordmark, swapping in the font on both its app and web player, and launching new marketing materials.
In the past, Spotify has used a typeface called Circular, an existing font that wasn’t unique to the brand. According to Rasmus Wängelin, Spotify’s global head of brand design, Circular’s presets offered limited flexibility for conveying different moods and emotions. The brand needed a font it could call its own.
“We built a lot of equity [with Circular], and it works really well inside of the app,” Wängelin says. “But at the same time, it has been limiting for us when it comes to expression. We work with so many different audiences—creators on our platform, our users, our advertisers—so it’s important that we show up in authentic ways in different spaces.”
To craft a versatile font that would also distinguish Spotify’s visual identity, Wängelin’s team and the designers at Dinamo took a deep dive into the history of typefaces across the audio space. They sifted through music posters, album art, and other marketing assets from jazz musicians and hip-hop groups to rock ’n’ roll stars. The body of fonts they found was so vast that they decided one style couldn’t encompass the full history they wanted to evoke. So they decided to mix elements from various schools of typography. The upper and lowercase S, for example, pulls inspiration from traditional humanist letterforms, while the J and K fit more within the angular grotesque font family.
Several additional aspects of Spotify Mix break away from typographic conventions. The t is connected from right to left by a swooping line, which Wängelin says is meant to mimic an audio wave. Inside geometric letters like a, d, and e, where the negative space would typically be a circle, Spotify Mix uses a kind of sideways teardrop shape—another stylistic choice that mimics audio amplification. Together, these small touches are meant to give the words flow and rhythm, just like the songs they describe. The typeface can be condensed, bold-faced, italicized, and stretched to span across genres and aesthetics.
Creating a standout typeface can be difficult in a marketing space where the pendulum of “trendy” fonts often swings quickly between the ultra-sleek and the maximalist. For Wängelin, the trick to making a typeface with longevity is “avoiding trends at all costs.”
“[A successful font] needs to have two things: functionality and emotion,” he says. “You can create a typeface that is super functional and extremely readable, but it’s just not that nice to look at. Or you can go very wild and create a typeface that is really out there, but then when you start putting it inside of the app, it just doesn’t work—it’s hard to read. When you manage to find that intersection of emotion and function, that’s when you’re successful with this type of work.”
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