Ever since Summer Showdown started. there has been one thing that has been bugging me. the logo.
Where the logo came from
The mark itself is not new. It was designed back in 2024 by Dutch, who put a serious amount of work into it in Figma, iterating on the wordmark, the weight and spacing of the letters, and above all the flame that stands in for the o in Showdown. It has been our identity ever since, on every stream, every overlay and every graphic we have put out.
So none of what follows is a knock on that work. The design was right the first time, which is exactly why we did not want to change any of it. What went wrong happened later, in how the finished logo got passed around and exported.
The flame was the problem
The flame is the one piece of the logo that was drawn rather than set in a typeface. Every other letter came out of a font file, so those edges stayed clean no matter what we did with them. The flame did not. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a shape and became a picture of a shape, carried around as a raster image for long enough that its outline had gone soft, and once it sat next to crisp letterforms the difference was obvious.
On the site at small sizes you could get away with it. On stream you could not. The moment the logo went into an overlay corner, a lower third, or showed full screem the letters stayed sharp and the flame went slightly fuzzy, with blurred edges and a bit of fringing where it had been cut out. One low quality element in an otherwise clean mark drags the whole thing down.
Why a re-export would not have fixed it
The obvious first move is to go back to the biggest copy of the file and export again at a higher resolution. That does not help. Once detail has been lost from a raster image it is gone, and scaling it back up only makes the softness larger and easier to see. Sharpening filters and background removal passes make it worse in a different way, you end up with hard noise around the curve instead of a blurry curve.
So the only real fix was to stop treating the flame as an image and start treating it as a shape. That meant redrawing it, and if the flame was being redrawn, the sensible thing was to rebuild the entire logo the same way rather than glue a new vector flame onto an old raster wordmark.
What changed
The logo is now a single SVG, drawn as paths rather than pixels. The flame was traced and rebuilt curve by curve so the taper at the top and the hook at the bottom hold their shape, and the wordmark was converted to outlines so it renders identically everywhere without needing the font installed.
Where possible we worked from Dutch's original Figma file rather than from an exported image, so the curves are the ones he drew rather than our best guess at them. Nothing about the design itself has changed. Same letterforms, same flame, same proportions, same spacing. If you put the old and new versions side by side at normal size you should struggle to tell them apart, which was the point. This was a quality fix, not a rebrand.
What did change is what we can now do with it. Vector art has no fixed resolution, so the same file is sharp on a Discord icon and sharp blown up across a 1080p or 4K stream. The file is also small, and because it is just paths and fill colours we can recolour it or pull the flame out on its own for a stinger or a watermark without exporting a new asset every time.
Where you will see it
The new mark is going out everywhere the old one lived, the site, the broadcast overlays, holding cards and scene transitions, and our social profiles. Any place that still needs a flat image gets a PNG exported straight from the SVG, so even the raster copies are now generated from clean source instead of from a copy of a copy.