Storytel came too early to the party. For 14 years, the company has delivered streaming audio storytelling, and built a solid user base across 17 markets for a service that the world has slowly caught up to. Now, with a booming market, their identity conveyed the image of a company from a different time. Our brief was to reinvent Storytel’s identity for a bold vision: to become a leading global content brand – the one that sets stories free. The objectives were to convey this vision, to create the toolbox that can start building a global household brand, across different cultures and character sets.

Storytel has a product that is for everyone with an interest in stories, which is why the new Storytel Visual Identity begins with the DNA of stories: Letters. We see and hear these letters combine in brilliant and surprising ways to touch our hearts, make us laugh, give us goosebumps, and change our lives. The idea was to craft the identity from these building blocks of stories in a way that makes the words move, twist, tangle and play.

Our identity channels these building blocks into a look and feel that is playful, fun, and impossible to forget. We hope the colors and playful typography do for eyeballs what great stories do for ear drums. We want to wrap viewers up in the same feeling we experience when we dive into a brilliant audiobook. We aim for a warmth and coziness that gets to the heart of our brand.

With the identity released just weeks ago, commercial results are too soon to judge. However, even before the full brand manual was released, the Storytel organization have fully embraced this significant change, with locally created material going live in the new identity. It has unlocked creativity across all markets and departments, as well as given direction and created consistency globally. The design has proven to be both practically workable across a large organization, and ownable against a multitude of competitors. The early feedback from customers has been overwhelming, with “modern”, “I see Storytel in a new light” and “This is Storytel” among the quotes.