Is Spotify Wrapped a design disaster or master stroke?

PLUS: The funniest memes and tweets around the annual Spotify tradition.

Trungphan2

Dec 11, 2021

Yo, Trung here. Thanks for subscribing to SatPost, a Saturday round-up of funny memes and tweets from the internet.

Today, we’re talking about Spotify Wrapped.

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Ok, everyone has had more than a week to digest Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform’s year-end summary of your listening habits.

Wrapped perfectly dovetails with our desire to signal “taste” and overshare on social media. It might also be some wild corporate jujitsu (but we won’t get into that).

Delia Cai @delia_cai

spotify the only tech company to figure out how to successfully rebrand "we've been tracking you" to "isn't this FUN"

Rather, let’s discuss Wrapped’s design aesthetic: the good, the bad and the memes.

The Good: Colors

Ever notice how red is super popular among fast food restaurant logos?

Apparently, the sight of red can stimulate your heart rate and increase your appetite. The color also carries emotional associations like excitement and danger.

I can’t speak to the science, but I do know that I was driving yesterday and — completely unplanned — ended up smashing 2 Big Macs after passing a McDonald’s billboard.

The design team at Spotify also uses color psychology per designer Dheeraj Nanduri. Specifically, Wrapped visuals have “uncommon shades of traditional colours” which “convey excess, fun, and frivolity”.

As shown in the table above, Spotify Green and Spotify Pink are “nestled in between the commonly observed colours and the eye-disturbing neon colours.”

These colours grab your attention and signal fun without the emotional triggers (like the urge to smash a burger). Smart choice.

The Bad: Font

Wrapped’s color psychology makes sense to me. This year, though, Spotify is taking major heat for its font selection.

Specifically, around how it displays “Your Top Genres”:

The vertical letters are virtually illegible when you get to the bottom of the list (we can’t knock the color, though…check out that uncommon shade of pink!).

A Twitter search of “Spotify Wrapped font” returns a lot of salty tweets:

The font issue made it to the top of the r/GraphicDesign subreddit and some interesting points were made:

If you tip your screen down, the font reads kind of normal (lol)
The font look is called brutalism

There’s actual legible labels to the right of the bar (so the shitty font inside the bar doesn’t really matter)
Apparently ugly and warped fonts are a trend in Estonia right now (which — according to Google Maps — is only a 52 hour walk from Sweden, where Spotify is from)
It looks like a bar code

But here’s the most important Reddit response

The design head behind Wrapped has a team of 15-20 people and they start planning the year-end drop from June. OF COURSE they knew what they were doing.

The ugly font is def intentional and got us all talking. #10DChess