Rebranding often allows brands to keep up with the latest visual trends. It is a brand updating its wardrobe for a new season. From Meta to Uber, tech brands are adopting minimalism for their UI. Goodbye bulky buttons, we are heading towards a buttonless world. Netflix takes a different approach. Instead of following a trend, it digs its heels further into its core values - pioneering, welcoming, and always stimulating.

Global Koto Studio launches the Netflix identity with a fresh set of illustrations, icons and typography. It artfully captures the art of filmmaking in the signature colour palette and moves away from the tiring trend of mono-dimensional forms. The new design toolkit is styled with a retro vaporwave aesthetic and integrates stimulating symbols of cinema.

They have revisited the brand’s bespoke typeface, Netflix Sans “with the different viewing experiences common to Netflix” to ensure consistency from flex to bold, cinematic title cards, genre-specific, or thematic comms. Paired with typeface, illustrations designed to capture the colourful cinematic experience that will please the sensibilities of filmmakers. It is the ground-up approach we like to see when it comes to understand your audience.

“Cinema uses a language of its own. Netflix approached us to inject some of that language graphically across their product experience and beyond,” says Koto Studio, “We evolved their previous system by connecting iconography, typography, and illustration to roots within the cinematic universe, referencing effects and techniques reminiscent of the film-making process—in a way that feels immediately Netflix.”

Of course, the retro-futuristic vibe is famously popular amongst brands, but it is the first time a big-tech brand has adapted this to its UI. Besides Netflix, we have also seen this approach on the Cred app, an Indian fintech brand. Is this the design language which will sweep our screens next? Only time will tell, and by that time we can turn into the all-new Netflix.

Credit: Koto Studio