Designer unmasks the secret of the PS5 logo

However you feel about it, Sony's not-particularly-new logo for the PlayStation 5 has definitely got people talking. Revealed this week at CES 2020, the new logo (above) is remarkable for its similarity to the PS4 logo, and indeed the PS3 logo – prompting some savage but hilarious reactions from the design community. 

Obviously it's never going to make it into anyone's list of best logos, and somehow we doubt that Sony even cares. It's almost as if the designer simply opened up SONY_PS4_LOGO_FINAL.AI, deleted the '4', typed in a '5' and saved it as SONY_PS5_LOGO_FINAL.AI before going home early. And fair play to them.

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That explanation's just not cutting it for some people, though. And while we're with Occam and his trusty razor when it comes to divining the process behind the PS5 logo, we can take a certain delight in this particular theory of how it came about:

Posted on Reddit by user DeBeard – we're not entirely sure if it's their work or not – this neat little animation surmises that the '5' in the PS 5 logo was created by copying, pasting, rotating and flipping the 'P'. And then drawing out an arm on the top, because that's definitely a lot less effort than hitting Backspace and pressing '5'.

That said, though, we've all occasionally found ourselves in a position where, due to lack of the right fonts, we've had to cobble together the odd glyph from bits of other characters, right? Right. And just maybe Sony's been a little careless with its in-house assets, and someone really did have to make a '5' out of the 'P'. These things happen!

Sorry, but no. Finding ourselves with just a little too much time on our hands this morning, we decided to try it for ourselves. And while it kind of fits, on closer inspection you can see that no, it doesn't quite fit enough. Take a look:

The top logo is one made by flipping the 'P' and drawing out an arm to turn it into a 5. The middle logo is the actual logo, with slightly mode pleasing curves around the midsection. And at the bottom we've overlaid the two; the grey areas are where things don't quite match.

So there you have it. Didn't happen. Sorry about that. To make up for it, here's a lovely tweet we found where someone remade the PS5 logo in the style of previous PlayStation designs.

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