Introducing the Kodi Logo

After many weeks of designing, deliberation, and a few beers, we are pleased to present the official logo of Kodi!

Logo Design History

It has been several months now since we introduced the new name for the software that we all love so much. In that time, the feedback we took most to heart was the fact that the community wanted to have a voice in major changes like this in the future.

So with that in mind, we went to the community for ideas and opinions on what might make the best kind of logo for our new name. The feedback we got was phenomenal, to the extent that we had a whole new problem: there were too many great ideas. Well over a hundred at last count.

With that in mind, we did a few things to narrow down the results. First, we had a user vote to get an idea of which ideas were more popular, and where some commonalities might lay.

It became clear fairly quickly that users prefered a logo that was more design mark than wordmark. Which is to say, most votes tilted towards single really cool designs, like play symbols, highly stylized versions of the letter K, and navigation buttons, rather than highly stylized versions of the entire word. The only stylized word that got many votes was the one for which there was a nifty animation. Beyond leaning towards design marks, there was a clear preference for stylized Ks and navigation arrows.

The user designs and results of the user poll were provided to doghouse media, the design firm we determined to work with from the start. Our directive to the firm was fairly simple: try to keep it simple, try to incorporate as many ideas as possible without making it ugly, and make sure it works everywhere.

Over the next several days, dhm provided us with about a dozen ideas. A few of the problems encountered in attempting to pull in user submitted ideas included converting 3D images into flat ones that are more easily printed, making logo ideas work on a variety of backgrounds, both light and dark, and even Team Kodi disagreement about which ideas should be given more or less focus in a final design.

Ultimately, a team vote was held over seven of the submitted designs to get the views of everyone inside Team Kodi. Of the top two vote getters, doghouse media, all the designers on the team, and even a number of outside designers all agreed that the second place vote getter was infinitely better than first place.

And thus, as required by the by-laws of the Foundation, the Foundation board held a vote to determine the final logo. It was unanimously agreed to follow with the universal opinions of a half dozen designers from both inside and outside the team.

Which gets us to this logo we are pleased to present today.

Logo Usage

For users interested in using the logo for business, fansite, or other purposes, we’ve put together a fairly simple Logo Usage page for you to browse. All usage rules are designed entirely to avoid confusion or associating Kodi with something that it isn’t and should mostly be common sense. If you do have a question though, feel free to ask in the forums.

A Challenge

Because the logo idea thread worked so well, we’ve got one last request. As previously mentioned, one of the most popular logos that we weren’t able to go with owed a great deal of its popularity to a REALLY cool animation associated with it. It was so popular internally that it reignited the idea of eventually animating the Kodi start screen. And so our request, our challenge to you all is this: animate the official Kodi logo. Make it look awesome. While it’s far too late for an animation to make it as the boot image for Kodi 14, there’s a very real chance that your work could be the first thing all of our over two million users see in Kodi 15 or sometime in the future.

To submit your animation, save it as an animated gif to imgur or your preferred image sharing site. Then post it here in the forum. We look forward to seeing what you come up with. Additionally, you can pull from a number of other official logo variations from this page, though we’ll probably prefer a dark or black background for any final animation.

And thanks again to all of our thousands of users who helped us move forward with this logo. We could not have done it without you.