Codecademy is the premier online platform for free coding lessons. Since launching in 2011, over 24 million users have submitted billions of lines of annotated computer code to help teach the next generation of programmers. Today, Codecademy partners with everyone from YouTube and Twitter to NYU and the White House in support of the company's mission to bring computer language into education.
Codecademy has grown into a respected institution, but the company's branding hasn't kept pace. When the company launched, more casual, script-like wordmarks were all the rage. Google's Lobster font was selected and, initially, it was successful in making Codecademy seem like a computer camp you might send your kids to. But it hasn't aged well. Lobster is the new Comic Sans in the eyes of many designers, and so Codecademy's wordmark made the company look like it was made up of yokels who didn't know much about design.
The company turned to Eddie Opara at Pentagram for a new identity. Opara's first move was to kill Lobster and replace it with a modified version of DIN Next (cheekily christened "CoDIN"). In this new wordmark, a bounding field box surrounds the word "code" and a blinking cursor sits underneath the "c."
Now based on the graphical cues of coding itself, the complete wordmark has another advantage: Adaptability. Codecademy covers a wide array of different programming languages such as CSS, PHP, HTML, Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. Each of these computer languages will now be contextually reflected in the company's wordmark by sweeping the word "code" away from the field box and replacing it with the language's name (or an icon representing it). This also helps guide users through the Codecademy site. If a user is learning HTML, for example, the wordmark at the top left corner of the site will read "HTMLcademy."
It's a vast improvement. Thanks to Pentagram, Codecademy has an identity to match its progressive pedagogical platform, one where learning code becomes a cornerstone in any education.
You can read more about Pentagram's process of re-branding Codecademy here.