Project Overview

What does the sound of Music look like? That is exactly what we asked our team when we began the creative exploration into the new Pandora brand identity.

Organisation

Pandora Media

Team

An in-house creative team consisting of Art Directors + Visual Designers. A few of the folks involved...
Tony Calzetta - VP Creative Services
Julie Scelzo - Executive Creative Director
Jeff Ho - Art Director
Shanna Pang - Sr. Visual Designer
Melissa Hicks - Visual Designer
Kimberly Trinidad - Sr Brand Manager

Project Brief

Music is a personal experience for everyone, from the artists creating it all the way to the fans listening to it. And as Pandora continues to evolve the most personal music experience, how can we visually embrace the dynamic range of sound and color, visualizing the energy and emotion that artists pour into the creation of music, and that we feel as listeners?

Project Innovation/Need

The new brand logo serves as a portal into the unique and diverse range of music that listeners love. Our dynamic brand visual identity system is composed of form, color and pattern, and represents the immersive experience one has once in the product.

Design Challenge

To create a dynamic brand icon that represents the feeling of music but void of cliches such as play buttons, records, music notes.

Effectiveness

During the week of 10/10/16, when the new Pandora brand identity rolled out into the market, the following summarizes some key highlights:

Audience: On the day we launched the rebrand, we crossed 30M unique listeners - our highest October day ever!

Press: +88 articles with majority positive to neutral, delivering + 291.7M impressions in trade publications. Here are some examples:
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3064564/pandora-overhauls-its-branding-to-look-the-way-music-sounds
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/pandoras-new-logo-channels-simplicity-80s-era-mtv/

Social: Generated +5k mentions and 75M impressions in social as well as +85k organic rebrand video views.