Letterboxd

Relaunch Design & Campaign

Art & Design Direction by Robin Sessions
Creative & UI Strategy by D Pine

I worked to create a top-down to refresh the Letterboxd brand, design a new UI landscape, and globally pare-down experiences to elevate Letterboxd’s core functionality and value.

As far as the community of film lovers is concerned, there’s no greater social space than Letterboxd. Nearly a decade since its public launch, Letterboxd has maintained its position as the first and last stop for all cinephiles to share, discuss, and discover films. Since their initial launch, Letterboxd has made minimal updates to its function, features, and identity.

The Approach

Capture the distinct motivations of the Letterboxd audience and offer them a refined space, that better delivers product value.

The Audience

Diarists

Movie fanatics documenting their film journeys. They catalogue watch histories, leave notes to self, and showcase their film experiences directly with other users.

Viewers

Eavesdroppers looking for the next best thing to watch. They browse new releases and trending reviews, listen in on critics’ conversations, and deep-dive into diaries.

Critics

Take-contributors andstarters-of-discourse. They go above and beyond to ensure their assessments are thorough and shape a film’s reception by their community.

The Design Direction

Inspired by the conversational nature of Letterboxd, we chose Helvetica as our base font, which maintains legibility in a range of sizes and weights. We paired it with a custom overlaid font that embodies the playfulness of the Letterboxd community, and together, they create the foundation for building the Letterboxd brand.

Using minimalism within the UI, we grounded the app in usability, while bringing in unique and ownable secondary elements to make navigation simple, yet enjoyable.

In our creative executions, we harnessed the power of our custom font to play with hierarchy, creating more ownable assets across the board.

Relaunch Campaign:
Film Studies

Film studies is an academic discipline that focuses on the theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form. Our relaunch concept would embody this with activations and events that bring the educational and conversational elements of Letterboxd to life outside of the platform itself.

Film Studies relaunched Letterboxd into the market, embodying its elevated look and feel with events and activations that promoted core offerings of Letterboxd. Each activation worked to showcase education, discovery, or discussion.

Call Sheet

Call Sheet would be Letterboxd’s value-add to their diary feature. Diarists would be able to bring their personal film experiences forward. Not only would Call Sheets offer hard-logged viewing hours more visibility, they would be an opportunity to reach other users — offering Viewers new films to add to their watch lists and inviting Critics to start even more discourse.

Best in Show

Letterboxd would curate film festivals at independent movie theaters all over the country. Each collection would be city-specific and include Q&As with filmmakers, allowing for in person discussions to occur. During these festivals, Letterboxd would take over the marquee to showcase the new brand.