User-powered library Scribd has launched a global redesign to “create a more modern brand”.
Founded in 2007, the platform is home to over 200 million documents in 261 languages.
The new brand design, titled ‘The Source. Life is an essay, and we are its bibliography,’ was devised in partnership with independent branding studio Mother Design.
It is hoped that the rebrand will make its site more user-friendly and increase “engagement and loyalty”.
According to Scribd, the independent design house has drawn inspiration from physical archives and libraries to reimagine the brand as a “contemporary content catalogue”. One redesign element it made was to frame its wordmark with square brackets to reference literary source lists.
Mother Design collaborated with Store Norske Skriftkompani to develop a new typeface that includes bibliographic symbols. It uses brackets and superscripts to optimise headlines.
Gemma Craven, vice president of brand marketing at Scribd said: “We leaned into our successful partnership with Mother Design to honour Scribd’s heritage as one of the first wave of internet brands while celebrating the product’s evolution into a fresh, necessary destination for knowledge seekers globally.
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“This new brand identity reflects our mission to democratise the exchange of information, building a digital world of knowledge and interests that rewards users’ curiosity with deep discovery across every topic imaginable.”
As part of the redesign, Script has updated its colour palette to reflect the “warmth and tactility of a physical archive.” The updated colour palette consists of soft earthy pastels.
The rebrand will be rolled out globally across Scribd’s web platform and apps.
Jo Tulej, creative director at Mother Design, added: “In our collaboration with the Scribd team, we’ve created a brand positioning that encourages deeper understanding rather than hot takes, borrowing visual cues from physical archives and libraries.
“The new identity imagines Scribd as life’s bibliographer—a platform that gives people much-needed context to truly understand the big and small of everyday life.”
