Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform that provides heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback tools to help businesses understand how users interact with their websites. The company was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Malta. In October 2021, Hotjar underwent a complete rebrand, replacing its original flame logo with a new abstract icon and wordmark designed by the London and Lisbon-based studio How&How.
Design and History
Hotjar’s original logo, in use from the company’s 2014 founding, featured a lowercase wordmark accompanied by a small flame icon. By the time of the 2021 rebrand, however, the company’s iconic flame had become a liability: it looked too similar to Tinder’s flame mark, and user feedback indicated the brand felt “too startup-y” and not inclusive enough for the broader audience Hotjar had grown to serve, which included students, entrepreneurs, SMBs, and mid-market enterprises.[1][2]
Hotjar approached How&How to lead the rebrand, which included a new logo, illustration and animation packages, and a redesigned website built on a headless CMS.[3] The new icon was designed to work primarily at 16px by 16px, the size at which it appears on millions of Hotjar feedback widgets across the web, while also scaling up for larger applications.[3][1]
The new icon drops the literal flame in favor of an abstract mark that How&How describes as a redrawn, flame-inspired symbol. It recalls the previous Hotjar flame while also containing a nod to an “H” letterform.[4] The icon typically sits alongside the “Hotjar” wordmark to form the complete logo.[2]
Meaning and Symbolism
How&How’s design process for the new icon began with three factors: Hotjar’s audience, its vision to put people at the center of every product, and its purpose to inspire change through empathy.[1] The icon itself is built from two curved lines. The first represents the user journey, and the second is a duplication of that line meant to show human connection and the support the product gives its customers. A gentle curve was then added to suggest heat from the iconic Hotjar flame, as well as the “H” inherent in the company’s name.[1][5]
Hotjar’s own account of the rebrand describes the icon as a combination of three elements: an emotive line representing users and their individual journeys, duplication and symmetry representing human connection, and a flame element that honors the company’s past for users who associate the flame with Hotjar’s prior identity.[6]
The broader brand system includes two graphic devices: gradient orbs that emulate web heatmaps in a more pleasant palette, and sinuous, jagged “trace lines” that replicate the mouse tracking of users on a website. These lines can combine happy curves with angry, jagged ones, reflecting the full spectrum of human emotion that Hotjar’s product visualizes, from frustrated clicks to contented browsing.[1][5]
Typography and Design
The Hotjar wordmark is set in Ambit, a typeface by CoType Foundry. How&How selected Ambit for its friendliness and its distinct “curls,” which mimic the expressive lines of user cursors browsing websites.[1] Hotjar’s website serves Ambit in multiple weights, including Regular and SemiBold.[7]
The color palette was inspired by the two warm and cool color components of a flame, helping to convey the warm and cool emotions visualized in the product itself.[1][5] The primary brand color is a vivid orange-red, with the Hotjar icon rendered in the hex color #FF3C00 across official brand assets.[8][9]
Logo Index is an independent educational archive covering logos, visual identities and graphic design history. All trademarks and brand assets remain the property of their respective owners.
