Kirby is beloved by Nintendo fans for his bright, cute design, fun personality, and a variety of abilities such as flying, inhaling enemies, and copying their skills. Kirby games are distinguished by colorful graphics, catchy music, and uncomplicated but addictive gameplay. The visual identity of the character is also very vivid and bright.
Kirby is a Japanese video game series created by game designer Sakurai Masahiro. Within a short period of time, Kirby has become one of Nintendo’s best-known franchises. The franchise includes over 30 games of various genres. Today, Kirby Ranks is among the best-selling video game franchises in history.
At first glance, Kirby doesn’t stand out from the motley crowd of Nintendo characters. He does not wear an elegant tie, does not dress in a futuristic spacesuit, and does not boast a plumber’s uniform. He is an ordinary balloon with legs and small wings. But behind the unassuming appearance hides out-of-this-world capabilities. Kirby easily draws enemies into himself and gains their abilities.
The introduction of an unusual pink character named Kirby was a very important milestone for Nintendo Japan and the video game industry as a whole in the early 1990s. Kirby joined the ranks of iconic Nintendo characters such as Mario, Link, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, and others.
Although he was originally created as a mascot for HAL Laboratory, over time Kirby has rightfully earned a place in the cohort of Nintendo’s own most popular and recognizable characters. Over the following decades, Kirby has appeared in dozens of video games, anime, manga comics, and other Nintendo products.
What is Kirby?
Kirby is the name of one of the most recognizable and beloved video game characters from Nintendo. It looks like a pink ball with ruddy cheeks that can fly and devour enemies. The Kirby character first appeared more than 30 years ago, in 1992, in Kirby’s Dream Land for the Game Boy handheld console.
In terms of visual identity, Kirby is as fun and bright as its character and mood. However, unlike the design of the character, the design of its logo was changed several times throughout the years. The logo was always executed in one style but had some differences in shapes and colors.
The original Kirby logo, created in 1992, stayed untouched for the first nine years of the franchise’s history. It was the uppercase lettering in a massive bubble-style typeface with the capital letters set in gradient yellow (getting lighter from top to bottom) and outlined in bright blue. The official version of the logo had no graphical additions.
The redesign of 2001 has changed the color palette of the Kirby logo to pink, repeating the colors of the character. The typeface of the inscription was also changed, with the uppercase wordmark replaced by a slanted title case, with the characters overlapping each other. Another thing in the new logo was a small yellow star in the negative space of the “B”.
In 2022, for the 30th Anniversary of Kirby, the logo was refined. The new badge is a combination of two previous versions, with some modifications. The characters got slightly larger than the ones on the logo from 2001, yet the contours were still almost the same. As for the color palette, it returned to the original state — yellow and blue, but with the shade of yellow more intense. The star in the “B” is now solid blue. Also, the yellow elements on the badge gained volume and more gradients.
The bright bubbly lettering from the primary logo of the Kirby franchise is set in a custom cartoonish typeface with rounded contours of the characters. The name of the font, used for the Kirby badge from 2022 is スーラ Pro EB Seurat Pro Extra Bold, and it was created by Fontworks.
As for the color palette of the Kirby visual identity, here we have different options from pink and white, to yellow and blue, but all of them are vivid, juicy, and attractive.