My formal design training predates much of what we now know about the modern web. In school, I was steeped in ancient texts and trained as a print designer where I learned that the future always benefits from a rich history of experiences and references. If you pay close attention to fashion and trends, you know this to be true. Old things frequently inspire the new, and while the Remix team has been hard at work shipping React Router v7, we decided to take a look at the brand identity to see if we could freshen it up a bit.
My name is Tim Quirino, and I've recently joined Remix as a Staff Product Designer after Shopify acquired my former company (Threads.com). In this blog post, we'll take a tour of the brand updates to React Router. I'll break it down into 3 parts; starting with the logo changes, continuing with the updates to the wordmark, and finishing with the creation of a ligature that marks this release.
The React Router logo is already an elegant abstraction of what React Router does. For anyone that doesn't know, it's a visual representation of a route tree. The connected nodes are an actively rendered route. There is meaning in the way it flows from top-to-bottom and connects adjacent nodes to present the quickest and cleanest path. If you've read Matt Brophy's post about Fog of War, you can see the obvious similarities.