Wordle is a game invented by a Brit named Josh Wardle. He wrote it for his girlfriend, Palak Shakh: during the lockdown of 2020, the couple became fascinated with crossword puzzles from The New York Times and decided to create their own, improved version.
In the spring of 2020, Josh Wardle, an American developer of British descent, created an online puzzle game called Wordle. Initially, the game was intended only for two people: the programmer himself and his girlfriend.
Before making the game public, Josh collected 12 thousand five-letter English words and then asked his girlfriend to mark which ones were familiar to her and which were not. In the end, the list of words was reduced to two and a half thousand. Since only one word a day appears in the puzzle, their stock should be enough for several years.
Josh Wardle launched Wordle on its website, powerlanguage.co.uk, in October 2021. Back in November, only 90 people knew about the free word-guessing game; two months later, the app’s audience numbered about 300,000 users.
By early 2022 the number of Wordle users exceeded 10 million. Wardle had no plans to make money with the puzzle, but he ended up selling both the game and the rights to it to The New York Times for more than a million dollars.
What is Wordle?
Wordle is the now-cult online game created by Josh Wardle in 2020. The aim of the game is to guess a single five-letter English word; there are no crossword puzzles, and you just have to act at random. But as in the classic crossword puzzle, the user must enter the word into a line of cells – to guess the correct version, he has six tries.
In terms of visual identity, Wordle is a very simple and modest game, which has its logo based on minimalistic lettering and quite a dull color palette. The only change of the logo was held after The New York Times had bought the rights in the game, in 2022.
The first version of the Wordle logo was introduced in 2021 and featured a simple uppercase wordmark in black letters, set in a geometric sans-serif typeface, very similar to Arial. The characters in the inscription were placed at a slight distance from each other, making up a very stable and concrete image. For the icon, the first letter of the game’s name, the “W”, was written in white over a muted green square, with no additional elements. The letter on the icon was set in the same typeface as the main logotype.
After the acquisition of the app by The New York Times, the Wordle visual identity was redesigned. The unusual shade of green from the original version of the logo was kept for the alternate variant of the Wordle badge. Although the primary logo is still composed of bold black lettering against a white background, now it is a title case inscription, and the typeface was switched to a heavy serif one. For the green and white version of the badge, each letter is set in white and placed on a separate green square.
The bold and stable title case lettering from the primary Wordle logo is set in a classy serif font with traditional contours of the letters. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Pablo Slab Condensed Bold, or Rude Slab SemiCondensed Extra Bold, although the official font is called Karnak Condensed Bold.
As for the color palette of the Wordle visual identity, apart from the traditional black-and-white duo, the game also uses a combination of light green and white, which looks very calm and relaxing, representing the game as a great way to spend your time and have fun.