All Grown Up: Rebranding Picsart
How Product Design drives and implements a new brand
Introduction
With over 150 million monthly creators, Picsart is already the world’s largest creative platform. Last month we launched our shiny new brand and visual identity — some key highlights include a new website homepage, a brighter and bolder app UI, and our new font Gilroy.
Over the last 6 months I’ve had the pleasure of leading the product design team for this rebrand and I wanted to share some of our process and design thinking.
Why Rebrand?
Picsart started out as a photo editing app on mobile for self expression, and over the years has grown to a fully fledged creative platform and community. From Instagram selfies to design hobbyists, from making t-shirts on Etsy to small business owners, our goal is to empower creativity in everyone.
We’ve grown up a lot in the last 10 years, with a robust video editor and effects, design templates, AI editing tools, and a host of design community features to connect creators around the world. With this in mind we took a step back to think about the future and where we are headed as a company, and how our brand needed to adapt to support this vision.
A Company-Wide Initiative
10% of the entire company were directly involved in this project in some way shape or form, which is over 70 people across 10 different teams, and 2 external teams. On the product design team, some of the key areas we focused on were the logo, colors, typography and tone of voice.
New Brand Elements
Working with New Company, we wrapped up our key new brand elements. We also have new, clearly defined brand attributes and design principles that help build a cohesive product.
Our next task was to stress test the visual identity and apply it to the product. There were two brand elements that we decided early on should not be used (or used sparingly) within product design — which were the extended color palette, and the use of static UI elements.
As seen above the extended color palette looks slick when used in a marketing context, but overuse of gradients and the darker tone of the gradients did not translate well into product. Similarly, the UI elements look great in print, but should be used sparingly in product design to avoid creators thinking that certain elements are interactive when they are not.
A Phased Approach
Next was how to scope out the implementation and roll out the rebrand in the product. We discussed how detailed to go from changing a few colors, to completely redesigning the entire app. We broke it down into 3 distinct levels, a 1:1 MVP style approach and two additive levels with high impact tabs and pages.
1:1 is more or less a direct translation, a find and replace of colors, logos, and fonts. The next level up includes the 1:1 and adds a refresh on the highest impact 5 tabs. And then finally, “Sparkle Pages” is an approach where we pick a further selection of key pages to receive a refresh treatment.
This methodology helped focus on what was important and guided our final phased approach (spearheaded by Maga). This approach starts with the 1:1 translation and high impact tabs, and progressively rolling out Sparkle Pages and updates from the design system over time.
Our New Logo
Since we’ve become so much more than just Pics & Art, we’ve evolved to lowercase the “a”. Goodbye PicsArt, Hello Picsart. The new geometric shape feels modern and simple.
The logo is a key anchor point and has been made visible in touch points like our registration page and home feed. (Props to Sean for our beautiful new home feed.)
Color
When auditing the colors used in the app, I found over 450 colors being used, including 200 shades of gray 😉. This was a great (and necessary) chance to clean up our color system as we also started building our design system at the same time. (Massive props to our new design system lead Dima for hitting the ground running just in time.)
Stress testing the new proposed color palette, we quickly realized we needed a third color in product. A third color allowed us to better support secondary actions and made our early mockups more diverse. This was particularly helpful for accessibility across light and dark mode.
We also explored the extended gradient palette which posed challenges by not having a clear consistent color scheme. The final decision was to limit the use of gradient in product design, except for key high-impact touch-points like our app icon and homepage.
After starting with 450 colors, the new color system is streamlined down to a neat 18 colors, and 12 shades of gray.
Typography
We stress tested dozens of fonts to ensure we had something that worked across all mediums and platforms, from giant billboards to 12 point in-app editor fonts.
Our new font Gilroy is an approachable and functional sans serif typeface that compliments our geometric logo well, and helps bring consistency across platforms as we grow our web product.
Tone of Voice
Working with Hermit, our new tone of voice is confident but casual, encouraging and unconventional. Instead of “Welcome to Picsart”, think “You’re Already an Artist”.
The old homepage featured language that was designed for machines more than humans, and focused only on photo and video editing.
We studied 3-part principles — what’s bad (red), our solution (green), and what life is like now (blue) to influence our direction.
This influenced our tagline “Professional-Level Design. No Art School Needed.” which much more clearly articulates what Picsart is about as a platform. (Props to Hunter for leading our tone of voice and Kevin + Beglar for our beautiful new feature carousels.)
What’s Next?
The brand refresh was a huge success and was well received with high engagement. More importantly, alongside our design system it was a great foundation for the future of Picsart and as we continue to scale.
We’re working hard to roll out the next phases of our refresh, to make the Picsart experience more consistent, to continue to push the boundary with brighter and bolder UI and to deliver a fun but professional tone of voice.
Further Reading
A New Chapter for Picsart from our creative director Shachar Aylon.
Branding Case Study from The New Company.
Tone of Voice Case Study from Hermit.
We’re hiring across the board— come say hi.
