During the summer of 2022, Sharp Type worked with Pentagram’s Emily Oberman to develop a customized version of Sharp Grotesk for Amazon Prime Video’s brand redesign. Lucas Sharp and My-Lan Thuong designed a type system that serves as the foundation of a revamped user experience in the world of Prime Video.

Pentagram wanted to use Sharp Grotesk – one of Sharp Type's most popular releases – for its extensive scale of weight and width. Its technical scalability and generous palette allowed us to customize the character set to meet Prime Video's needs.

The text needed to be fresh, familiar, and have flair. The type system had to act as both a unique brand signifier but also work as a practical mass communication tool.

Called Prime Video Sharp, the final customization has multiple weights that support the bold and bright energy of the brand and its new direction. All the characters were subtly rounded, including the punctuation, and certain characteristic letterforms like the C, G, K, M, and R were opened up a bit. Further adjustments were designed to work hand-in-hand with dozens of playful symbols spanning genres of media.

The finished custom font is adaptable and applicable across Prime Video's wide reach of programming and massive audience. It was made to be applied in digital contexts, such as social media, motion graphics, TV, and the Prime Video player, as well as in the real world – on billboards, in subway stations, and for branded swag.

See more on the websites of Sharp Type and Pentagram.

Vanguard CF in use in wordmark and key art for The Peripheral

Vanguard CF is used in main typeface for The Peripheral, an Amazon Prime Video adaptation of the William Gibson novel, produced by Scott Smith and starring Chloe Grace Moretz. From Wikipedia:

Set roughly a decade in the future, with some new tech that has changed society in subtle ways, a VR gamer is delivered a connection to an alternate reality, as well as a dark future of her own.

Vanguard CF is used primarily as the logotype for the series, with additional usage in trailers and related media. It is often paired with Amazon Ember, Amazon’s in-house typeface.

Vanguard CF in trailer for The Peripheral

Key art for The Peripheral with Vanguard CF and Amazon Ember in use

Key art for The Peripheral with Vanguard CF and Amazon Ember in use

All the Old Knives is an American thriller film directed by Janus Metz Pedersen and screenplay by Olen Steinhauer. It is based on the novel of the same name by Steinhauer. It stars Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, and Jonathan Pryce. The film is scheduled to be released in limited theaters and on digital on Amazon Prime Video on April 8, 2022.

Alias Cactus is used for title type.

[More info on IMDb]

English movie poster.

Invisible Life is a movie where two sisters born in Rio de Janeiro are kept apart by a terrible lie and a conservative society. They make their way through life each believing the other is living out her dreams half a world away.

Velodroma (RenegadeFonts) is used for various movie posters and also apears in the trailer. The all-caps display sans serif is featured in all of its three widths. The fonts come with stylistic sets that help to create a (pseudo)random pattern of alternating regular, wide, and superwide glyphs. In the movie logo and the trailer, the strokes of the first and last letter were additionally hyper-extended for a cinematic widescreen effect.

Still from the trailer.

Still from the trailer.

Still from the trailer.

Italian movie poster.

English movie poster by Films We Like.

Portuguese movie poster.

Portuguese movie poster.

Book covers for Biblioteca Áurea, a collection of classic novels that is (re)published by Editora Nova Fronteira in partnership with Amazon Brazil.

The new Kindle Paperwhite, announced today, adds a bundle of font options for an e-ink display device that previously offered only PMN Caecilia. But most welcome to me in that list of options is "Publisher Font", which lets book designers make their own typographic choices (and embed their own fonts) just like they would in a book’s printed edition. I assume this equivalent to the “Original” option in Apple’s iBooks app. From the product page:

Hand-Tuned Fonts
All six fonts on Kindle Paperwhite have been hand-tuned at the pixel level for maximum readability and comfort. Higher resolution allows for unprecedented sharpness. The new high-resolution display allows for elegant typeface options including Baskerville and Palatino.

These are pretty unimaginative choices, (in contrast to the latest book-friendly fonts added to iBooks), and Futura is an especially odd selection for long reading, but perhaps they are indeed well tuned for this particular display. I’ll write a more detailed report once I see the device in person.

Logos for the Kindle and Kindle Fire use Amazon’s custom logotype by Turner Duckworth and Bliss by Jeremy Tankard. I don’t know yet who designed this identity.

Amazon is now using Brandon Grotesque for various marketing materials, including today’s Kindle event and the Kindle purchase pages.