Miro Brand Guidelines: The Yellow, the M & Joan Miró

Miro wants to feel like a blank canvas full of possibility — and it borrowed a painter’s name to say so.

Miro is an infinite online whiteboard, and its identity is built to feel like creative permission: bright, playful, a little hand-drawn. The name is a double meaning the company owns openly — a nod to the Catalan painter Joan Miró, whose bold outlines and joyful shapes suit a collaboration tool, and a reference to the Slavic root “mir,” meaning “peace” or “world.” Both readings are intentional, not folk etymology, and both push the same idea: an open, borderless space for people to think together.

The company was founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin and rebranded to Miro in 2019 — a much shorter, warmer, more ownable name. A further visual-identity overhaul in 2023 (with agency Vruchtvlees) refined the system, softening the logo’s rounded square and letting the letterforms of the “M” breathe. Keep the two dates distinct: 2019 was the rename, 2023 was the design refresh.

Miro’s yellow is a protagonist precisely because it’s rationed. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The hero colour is Miro yellow #FFD02F (“Sunglow”) — optimistic, energetic, and unmistakable — grounded by a deep navy #050038 (“Stratos”) that carries text and gives the brand gravity, plus a Miro blue #4262FF for interface accents. The discipline is in the restraint: yellow is used sparingly, as a spot colour for the mark and key calls to action, never as a wall of fill. That’s what keeps it feeling special. (You’ll see #FFDD33 quoted around the web; the correct value is #FFD02F.) The 2023 refresh added softer creams and secondary accents, but the yellow-on-navy contrast remains the signature.

Miro’s palette comes with a hard accessibility lesson built in: bright yellow all but disappears on white. Yellow text on a light background fails contrast badly, which is exactly why Miro never uses it that way — the yellow lives as a fill behind dark type, as the logo’s ground, or as a spot of energy against the deep Stratos navy #050038, where the pairing is bold and highly legible. Follow the same rule in your own work: put #FFD02F under near-black type or reserve it for shapes and highlights, and let the navy and blue carry anything that has to be read. Rationing the yellow isn’t only an aesthetic choice about keeping it special — it’s the practical reason the brand stays readable while still feeling unmistakably, joyfully Miro.

The type system does the heavy lifting the single colour won’t — three faces, three jobs.

Miro’s 2023 identity uses three licensed typefaces, each with a role: Spoof for expressive display and headlines, Formular for functional UI and body, and Tiempos for long-form editorial. There is no proprietary “Miro font” — the custom-font feature people cite is a product capability (uploading brand fonts to a board), not the company’s own face. Splitting display, interface and reading type is a mature move: it lets marketing feel characterful while the product stays calm and legible, all under one recognisable yellow-and-navy roof.

The whole system is engineered to make a blank board feel inviting rather than intimidating.

A blank canvas can be the scariest thing in creative work. Miro’s brand answers that anxiety with warmth: a joyful yellow, playful Miró-style illustration, and a friendly display face all say “just start.” The “portals” and infinite-canvas motifs in the refreshed system tie the visuals directly to the product experience — boundless space you and your team fill together. It’s branding as encouragement, which is exactly what a whiteboard needs to be.

For designers, Miro shows the power of a single, disciplined colour. One yellow, used rarely and always against the same deep navy, is more memorable than a rainbow used everywhere. Pair that restraint with a name rich in meaning and a type system that knows when to play and when to behave, and you get an identity that feels both creative and grown-up — the exact balance a serious collaboration tool needs to strike. The best proof of the system is how little of the loud colour it actually takes: a brand can be instantly recognisable on a single well-chosen hue, provided it has the nerve to use that hue rarely and the same way every time.

Keep Miro’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.