“No grid, no rules”: How the Spotify design team created the identity for this year’s Wrapped

The initial direction was decided upon way back in June. Rasmus then converted this initial concept into a brief for the design teams, and his aim with this is always for the team to feel both “inspired and hopefully a little bit nervous,” he says. “That’s when we know we’re in a good place.” After that, the design teams, under design directors Mariola Bruszewska and Bruno Borges, carried out a weeks-long phase of exploration and experimentation. “We start so early, in June, because we need that space to explore,” Rasmus explains. “To explore a lot of the bad design or a lot of design that just doesn’t make sense. We don’t settle until we’ve talked about the design one time too many, rather than one time too few.”

Once the team had explored a range of different options for the direction, they picked an idea that they were confident would look great, feel fresh and be able to scale to a global campaign. “That’s when the work actually starts,” says Rasmus. The goal is to produce what Rasmus describes as a “cohesive global toolkit, with descriptions, examples and templates”, which will then be sent around the world to Spotify’s comms and marketing teams, as well as external partners worldwide.

This year’s identity threw up a particularly intriguing challenge. It was designed to feel chaotic and fluid, but it also had to be incredibly systematised and functional, packaged up into a toolkit to then be executed by countless teams worldwide. “That was one of the challenges this year: How can we create something that feels so fundamentally fluid and organic, but as a system?” Rasmus notes.

He feels strongly that the designers on the team – Erin Safreno, Melissa Miyamoto-Mills, Chris Cyran and Will Oswin – succeeded in overcoming that challenge. The team came up with a layered approach, which allows them to dial up and dial down certain elements to create what Rasmus calls “a layout system that feels fluid and dynamic, untamed and playful” at the same time. “What I love the most about this year’s design is that if you look at it, it almost has this feeling of just sitting down and designing without overthinking what you’re doing,” he says. “It’s almost like you’re just putting on good music and letting the colours and the shapes just come together. And there’s no grid, no rules.”

For him, this is what happens when design strives for something beyond pure usability or, on the other side, beyond artistic expression without functionality. “I really hope the design industry embraces more of this over the coming years,” he says. “Because I love the intersection of the emotion you get from looking at art, and the functionality that design gives you. When these two worlds come together, you create the best work.”