Max, Formerly Known as HBO Max, Launches New Black-and-White Logo and Color Palette, Evoking HBO Branding

It’s not HBO, it’s Max — but the new logo for Warner Bros. Discovery‘s streamer now certainly looks like HBO’s at a glance. The Max streaming service has quietly launched a fresh look, ditching its shiny blue user interface for a new monochrome color palette that, either purposefully or not, evokes the longtime branding of HBO.

The rebrand, which was updated on the service and its social media outlets Sunday morning, now matches Max with the same palette of the HBO logo, which may help consumers associate the two brands with one another. (Both Warner banners share the same CEO in Casey Bloys.) The new look also resembles the monochrome branding of Apple TV+, another streamer that is largely associated with mature programming.

A representative for Warner Bros. Discovery was not immediately available for comment.

The jump to black-and-white branding is not Max’s first aesthetic intervention. When Warner Bros. first launched the streamer in 2020, it was introduced to the market under the name “HBO Max,” brandishing a deep purple palette. But after the film and television studio was spun-off by AT&T to merge with Discovery, Inc. in 2022, the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery announced plans to change the branding.

The service relaunched as Max in 2023, integrating its library with Discovery+ and swapping the purple tones for blue ones. Notably, the dotted “a” in the middle of the Max logo evoked another dotted logo vowel: the “O” in HBO.

At the time, CEO David Zaslav attributed the decision to rename the service to a desire to signal a broader programming slate and indicate to consumers that Max offered more than the premium, largely mature television programs produced by HBO. “Every member of the household [can] see whatever they want at any given time,” Zaslav said at the time, announcing the new name.

The company also shed light on the decision to shift from purple branding to blue branding, with then-global CMO Patrizio Spagnoletto telling AdWeek that the option was “the most liked color, universally.” (Spagnoletto left Warner Bros. Discovery in 2024.) Warner Bros. Discovery considered several other colors — including a possibility of sticking with purple. With the Max relaunch, the service became one of several streamers with blue branding, landing somewhere between the darker shades of Disney+ and the bright flares of Paramount+ and Amazon’s Prime Video.

“There’s different types of blue, and if you put us in juxtaposition to Disney or Paramount or Prime, they look different,” Spagnoletto said at the time. “With our blue and the way that the logo is designed, what we were going for is a combination of premium but accessible.”

Spagnoletto also acknowledged that, “Consumers will tell us if we got it right, and we think we did. But there’s enough room in the world of blue to still differentiate ourselves.” Now, just under two years later, consumers, or some other parties, have convinced Max that it may have not “got it right.”