Brand Design
Who are our inspirations? How does Filmify want to present itself to the world? To create a brand for Filmify, we investigated these questions.
Personality levers
Smart or friendly? Objective or emotional? Experimental or tried-and-true? A “personality levers” exercise pairs dissimilar words, not necessarily direct opposites, and aims to guide team discussion on brand direction.
Each team member completed this exercise individually, thoughtfully placing a dot along each lever where they felt Filmify belonged. Once everyone completed the exercise, our team viewed all of the dots together.
We agreed on words like “eye-catching” and “experimental.” The exercise also led to a discussion of other words to describe Filmify, like “celebratory” and “bold.” The next step was taking these feelings and translating them into real imagery that could influence Filmify’s brand.
Inspiration
Sifting through the hundreds upon hundreds of images and brands we see a day, the design team collected examples that they thought matched Filmify’s words and direction. Designers shared their inspiration with the team, prompting new discussions about what people liked and didn’t like.
While Depop was too Gen-Z and Apple wasn’t risky enough — brands like The 19th and Masterclass rang true to everyone’s vision for Filmify. The 19th had a color scheme that felt true to its mission and audience. Masterclass focused on the people behind each lecture and provided a clean interface to engage with their content.
From these examples, Filmify settled into its final form — bold, disruptive, with intent, trustworthy, and empowering. Punches of color paired with an experimental serif for headers and with a clean san-serif font for the body would create the engaging visual experience Filmify hoped to be.
Colors + Fonts
Filmify is in your face about the lack of diversity in Hollywood. Current institutions may hide away from these discussions, but Filmify is here to amplify these discussions and be a wake-up call for film enthusiasts.
Our desire to be bold and disruptive led to developing a rather, well, punchy color palette.
On top of choosing visually intriguing colors, these colors also passed the AA threshold on our selected background color, In the Shadows Blue. Learn more about designing for web accessibility here.
The next step to finalizing our brand was choosing typefaces. Sites like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts provide so many options, maybe too many options, to explore. After countless hours of pairing types and trying different looks, the team settled on the combination of Bely Display and Epilogue.
Filmify’s brand was starting to transform into its final form. Using our word, colors, and type choices — the next step was to create a distinct mark representing us.
Logo + Wordmark Development
To start our exploration, each teammate sketched concepts for about five minutes. This activity gave the team a breadth of ideas to pursue. Everyone picked one or two logo concepts they wanted to elevate from a quick pencil sketch to a vectorized image.
We decided to pursue Josh’s design, which ingeniously encompassed equality and film into just two lines. Imitating the wave of film strips, Josh formed an equal sign by pairing two together.
With such a simplistic logo, it made the most sense to pair it with our Epilogue font. Josh fine-tuned Filmify’s wordmark by adjusting some characters to match the curves in the logo. These tweaks made the logo feel more balanced when paired with the wordmark and made it unique to Filmify.
Conclusion
Developing a brand is no easy work. The team created Filmify’s brand through many trials and errors, but the result was well worth it. When trying to create a brand, there aren’t corners that a team can cut or ideas that get rushed. It is only from the in-depth exploration that we formed Filmify’s personality.
Stay tuned on our Medium page for more weekly sneak peeks of our design and development process behind the scenes.
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