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Ritupriya BasuRaw, playful and laced with a chaotic energy: we dive into the making of Spotify Wrapped 2023
At the end of each year, there’s no escaping Spotify Wrapped. Popping up on our phones with revealing breakdowns, the global, sweeping campaign comes in hot with a personalised experience that tells us, individually, how we’ve been really feeling this year. Whether you’re a Vampire or a Hypnotist, Wrapped dissects your streaming habits to unveil clever insights, including assigning you a character that probably tells you more than you knew about yourself.
To bring together all the different parts that makes Wrapped tick, the design team at Spotify leads with an identity that, in its own way, captures the feeling of the year that was. In a decided departure from last year’s structured, ‘monogrammed’ design, this year Wrapped seemed to be laced with a more chaotic energy. With pixelated artworks, warped shapes and an almost Word Art-esque feel, the team leaned into a lo-fi take, inspired by memories of the early internet. “This year was all about being raw, playful and honest,” Rasmus Wangelin, Global Head of Brand Design at Spotify tells us.
To dig a bit deeper, we sat down with Wangelin for an in-depth conversation about the increasing overlaps between the internet and real life, the importance of hard deadlines, and the intimidating – but ultimately rewarding – process that leads the team to the identity each year.
This year was all about being raw, playful, and honest.
RB Hi, Rasmus! The Spotify Wrapped 2023 campaign is looking amazing, and pretty much all over the internet, as you’d expect. Now that that BIG project is all wrapped up and out in the digital ether, how is the team feeling?
RW Thank you so much for the kind words. It’s been a massive cross-functional effort to make Wrapped better and bigger than in previous years, and many of the teams worked up to the last minute to make sure everything was as good as possible.
Spotify Wrapped is our annual thank you to users, artists and creators around the world. Every year, we aspire to create a completely new and unique articulation of how it comes to life for our listeners. This year’s Wrapped is a celebration of the real, the realer and the realest listening moments that defined our year, and the feedback we’ve gotten has been incredible. I think people really felt and understood this year’s creative angle and the design, and seem to appreciate the creativity we brought with it.
RB What does the process of designing such a big campaign such as Spotify Wrapped even look like?
RW Our incredible strategy team started early to look at interesting creative ways to capture how we all felt and how we can talk about it. We collaborate closely with the brand team, the creative team and a range of cross-functional teams and leaders to align on something that feels interesting and a good foundation to build all the work on top of.
We look for interesting ways to transfer the insights into creative tension points.
RB What are you looking at as points of inspiration when designing the campaign? How do you dig into the ‘culture of a year’, so to speak, to capture the energy of the year that was?
RW Once our overall strategy is in place we try to build a design brief based on it. We look for interesting ways to transfer the insights into creative tension points. There’s honestly no linear way of doing this, and it’s all a pretty organic process that includes plenty of conversations with various design leaders and thought leaders at the company.
The real magic of design still happens when people get to freely explore ideas, and together we can talk about what works and what doesn’t. We usually have numerous directions in the first round and narrow it down from there to a few ideas we want to really explore. This is one of my favourite moments in the creation process, and is a testament to the fact that collaboration can lead to really great work.
RB This year’s campaign definitely felt more free-wheeling than the last. Was this approach a deliberate one?
RW Absolutely, everything we do is considered to the tee. We went through a lot of rounds to get it just right! But there was absolutely a sense of moving away from an expected structure and making work that would be eye-catching at first glance which became a core part of our approach.
RB What led you and the team to this stylistic direction – to the pixelated artworks, saturated colours, and the almost Word Art-esque feel of the design?
RW As mentioned before, we explored many different routes but when Bruno Borges, a Design Director on the team, showed us early stages of what eventually became the final design, we all fell in love with the approach. It was raw, playful, honest, and very different from last year’s monogram-inspired design.
Thematically, this year we felt inspired by the convergence of the internet and real life. It’s getting increasingly harder to know where one ends and another begins, and we wanted the design to encapsulate that feeling. Visually, there’s definitely a nod towards the expressiveness of the early 2000s internet design, put together in a playful and celebratory way.
RB How important is editing in your process, when it comes to paving the way to the final output? How do you decide which elements add to or dilute the final visual direction?
RW I think there’s both an emotional and a logical aspect to consider when editing. Firstly, the design needs to work, scale and not be too difficult to adjust. Wrapped is a very dynamic campaign that works across so many surfaces and placements and initiatives.
On an emotional level, we really try to keep the integrity of the design when we start editing. There’s a fine line between editing out things and losing the core of what makes the design good in the first place. So these two things are always a balancing act when creating design at scale.
I’ve been across quite a few Wrapped to date, and so it helps coming in with that experience of knowing, almost instantly, what will work and won’t.
RB How do you ensure the team truly explores each idea that’s on the table, without worrying too much about ‘this might be a bad idea, or a bad direction’?
RW I think a good way to approach that is to let the first round of design be completely open, and the feedback that you give is strictly functional, i.e. this looks cool, but how do you envision this scaling in these x-y instances? Do you think the design gives enough clarity to the strategy? Do we think this approach is globally understandable? How hard is this design to work with? How does it move? One of our main considerations is to make sure it maintains its integrity and beauty as it scales from big to small.
RB How important is motion in Spotify Wrapped?
RW Super important! We worked with Hornet/Vucko on the motion toolkit, and they are great at understanding our vision and bringing it to life in the right playful way.
Since Wrapped is mostly a digital campaign, motion is really a core part of that experience. From the very first part of our explorations, we look for design solutions that can naturally move.
RB Could you take us through the toolkit you create for the global teams, what it includes and entails to ensure nothing is lost in translation?
RW We create a very robust toolkit for our global partners because the integrity of the creatives I spoke about is very important.
The purpose of the toolkit is to provide the necessary strategic, creative foundation and design guidelines to expand and localise the campaign, with the goal of both global consistency and local relevance. We usually end up with hundreds of pages of strategy, tone of voice, design guidelines, and templates, along with a ton of other important things.
At the end of the day, aesthetic preferences are very much subjective.
RB With a campaign of this scale, especially with a process that spans over months, how do you know it’s time to draw a line under the work and say ‘That’s finished’?
RW This is an example of where a hard deadline can be useful at times. There’s a date when we lock our design in order to have time to build the creative toolkit, and give the markets enough time to execute their local work.
RB Taking off from that thought, does the idea of creating a campaign with such a tremendous reach across the world feel intimidating for the team, at all?
RW Absolutely, but it’s a challenge we love. We have honest conversations internally that not everyone will love our approach, and it’s because we don’t aspire to create safe work. We want you to feel something when you interact with Wrapped, and to get that right on a scale is intimidating. We also allow space for things to not go exactly as planned, and if something goes wrong, we learn and try to make it better next year. It’s important we come from a place of playful curiosity when designing Wrapped. At the end of the day, aesthetic preferences are very much subjective.
Humour has always played a big part of Spotify’s communication.
RB The campaign is also peppered with insights, interpreted cleverly by your team – such as the spanking new yacht for Lil Yachty. How important is it for the team to find these moments of play and humour within the campaign?
RW A big shout out to the conceptual Wrapped teams at Spotify, this year led by Lauren Ferreira. They do an excellent job at finding fun insights from the year and turning them into creatives. Humour has always played a big part of Spotify’s communication, but in the end, we try to have a campaign that touches on a range of emotions.
RB What would you say is the most rewarding aspect of getting to work on Spotify Wrapped each year, and finding ways of bringing the campaign to music lovers across the world, in a fresh new look and format?
RW The most rewarding aspect is really how the world embraces Wrapped and brings it to life outside of all the work we’re doing. People are talking, sharing, making memes and so much more. It really feels like a massive cultural moment for audio lovers.
We’ve recently seen people referring to Wrapped as a holiday gift which is pretty incredible.