Eventbrite Design: An evolutionary process

David Scott
Prototypr
Published in
7 min readMay 11, 2016

How do we modernize and refresh our brand without completely changing it? How do we create a visual system that allows for more creativity and expression? How can we build a design system with purpose and meaning and have it be sustainable?

These are just some of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves at Eventbrite recently as we rolled out the first phase of our brand evolution. I say “first phase” because this is only the beginning of an ongoing journey.

The goal of this evolution was never to draw a lot of external attention — but to do good work, address some key pain points in our design, and then keep moving forward.

That being said, we’re very proud of the work we’ve done so far. And since I’m a big fan of documenting progress, I thought I’d share some of the journey we went through to get here.

Components of our brand evolution

So, what did we roll out in phase one? Two big things — both integrally connected, but separate in their purpose. The first was an internal brand framework, which was created to align the company around a common set of values and beliefs. The second was an evolution of our core visual system, which ties back closely to our framework.

Since I head up the Brand Design team at Eventbrite, this article will focus more on the design updates we made.

Eventbrite Design Lab

Evolving the logo

The goal of this evolution was to look at every part of our visual system, leaving nothing untouched. Of course, that included the logo.

However, our approach was to look at the logo through an objective lens first before assessing it subjectively. Most importantly, we wanted to identify pain points and solve against those. After a lot of assessment, we identified 3 main issues with the current logo:

  1. The logo looked like a button. This caused problems with hierarchy within our designs — and it also was a problem for UX.
  2. Alignment issues. The logo was difficult to align in compositions, both horizontally and vertically.
  3. Scalability. The logo didn’t perform well when reduced down to small sizes. This was a big issue considering our focus on designing mobile-first as we grow.

Ultimately these pain points could be resolved by removing the container shape and evolving the logo to a stand-alone word mark. In doing so, it also gave us the opportunity to modernize the logo, lose an artifact from an earlier brand story (the container was meant to look like a street sign), and craft something customized and ownable.

Needless to say, we did a lot of exploration and ideation. Who would have thought an “E” would be such a challenging letter to craft?

After many rounds of refinement and painstaking construction, we ended up with something that we really love. Each of the letters contain shared DNA in their construction. These common elements tie the letters together, and create a clear evolutionary thread between the original and new wordmark.

What we’re especially proud of is that this evolution was not about wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch. And it wasn’t about change just for the sake of change, either. It was about looking at what we currently had, identifying what was working and what wasn’t, and then designing against that.

Refining our typography and our color palette

Along with updating our logo, we also reevaluated the building blocks of our design system: typography and color.

Typography is one of my greatest passions as a designer. I truly believe that typography separates most good design from bad. As such, our work here is far from over — we will constantly be striving for better typography at Eventbrite as we continue to evolve. For this particular update, we kept Benton Sans as our brand typeface, but moved away from the excessive use of the bolder weights, which feel heavy-handed in our designs. Instead, we’re moving to more refined use of our typeface, paying careful attention to hierarchy.

The updates to our color palette are much more pronounced.

Orange remains as our brand color: there is equity in it for Eventbrite, and after analyzing our system, we decided that it didn’t need to be completely changed. The particular shade did change, though. The previous orange was extremely vibrant and didn’t play well with other colors, not to mention accessibility. As a result, it’s use within our designs was very limiting. This meant that we were owned by orange as a brand, and despite having equity in the color, we weren’t able to leverage it tactically in our design. With our evolution, we’ve adjusted our brand orange to make it more usable with other colors and improved it’s accessibility too. This means we can now use it with more purpose within our system.

The rest of our old palette followed a similar pattern to our previous orange — the colors didn’t work together as a system. As a result, our designers resorted to using the same colors constantly, and the remaining palette went untouched.

With the evolution we’ve introduced some beautiful blue-greens in our new, limited palette. These new colors work wonderfully together creating a very cohesive set of colors. And with our much more purposeful use of orange, this is a color palette that will be sustainable for our design system — and something we can build equity in going forward.

The introduction of secondary graphics

The final piece to note with the update to our brand system is the introduction of some new secondary graphics. These are actually super crops of a beautiful Eventbrite script created by the very talented Jessica Hische. This script contains some wonderful line-work, and depending on the scale of the crop, can be used to add varying degrees of expression to our designs. We’ve combined these with our new color palette to add layering and dimension to our compositions when needed. This is the beginning of a budding idea and is something we’re excited to evolve.

Eventbrite App
Eventbrite Organizer App
Event listing page

And there you have it! Some brief thoughts documenting the beginning of our evolutionary process for Design at Eventbrite. The whole design team has worked exceptionally hard on developing these preliminary building blocks of our brand design system. And even though they may seem simple, a lot of care and thought went into their creation. We know that these beginning pieces are not some sort of conceptual masterpiece, but that was never our intention. This was a collaborative effort between Brand and Product and UX Design to create something that we could actually use in the evolution of our design system — and something we could call upon to express the personality of the brand.

Our next steps are to flex this across our marketing material and work it incrementally into the design of the product — while continuing to evolve the core system itself. There are so many more things we’re excited to get to, like illustration, patterns, and motion design, to name just a few! And there’s some very exciting updates to the product design coming in the future. We will continue to push ourselves as a design team, and grow a lot in the process — both of which are core to the Eventbrite philosophy.

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Published in Prototypr

Prototyping, UX Design, Front-end Development and Beyond 👾 | ✍️ Write for us https://bit.ly/apply-prototypr

Written by David Scott

Creative Director @Eventbrite. Previously @MovingBrands @Apple. Passionate about design and making things. www.davidjohnscott.com @djskenya instagram: djskenya

Responses (17)

What are your thoughts?

Shane Fontane Thank you, Shane!

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It’s nice to be able to “see” within the thought process of a designer. You can learn so much from it.

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Thanks David Scott for sharing our design journey; I’m immensely proud of you and the team for this first step (giant leap) into a new era of Design for Eventbrite.

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