We also wanted to adhere to guidelines from our Brand & Creative team, to help us ensure our brand would be recognizable as part of the Spotify family while still representing our design identity - one that’s fun, curious, and vibrant. And a diluted, design-by-committee, trying-to-please-everyone-but-actually-pleasing-no-one brand was #1 on our “How do we know if we’ve blown it?” list of hazards. Respecting individual viewpoints is extremely important to us because of our diverse and multi-disciplinary community, and we wanted all our designers to feel ownership over the new brand.īut we also wanted a strong direction. Because while designers tend to have balanced perspectives, supernatural empathy, and scarily spot-on hunches, they also have tons of opinions! It was during preliminary research sessions with our design team that we first encountered the paradox of designing for designers. We could see that our designers craved a more flexible, playful system that would allow them to tell stories, explore big ideas, and energize our community. Assets for presentations, social media, and in-person happenings were being created by different teams, and the interpretation of our design guidelines was a bit, um, how do we put this? A bit relaxed. We saw that designers were pushing our Spotify Design brand system to the breaking point. Then in September of last year, we stood back, took a hard look at what we’d done, and realized we’d missed an opportunity. We started developing a brand for our discipline through an external website, social media ( Twitter and Instagram), and cool events. In 20, Spotify began to play a stronger role in the global design community. Its companion piece (coming soon!) will show how we applied the new brand to this bright and shiny website that you’re currently looking at. This first installment will cover the rebrand of Spotify Design. We’ll explain what we did and why we did it, plus tell you what we learned about wrangling stakeholders and embracing color in the age of dark themes.

In this two-part article, we’ll give you the scoop on our collaborative project to level up our Spotify Design brand.

Spotify color palette tool