The Simple Joy Of Design
THE CHALLENGE
Picsart had 150 million people creating things every month. Memes, album covers, portraits, collages. The product worked. The community was real. But the brand looked like it had been designed for a different company entirely.
The old wordmark sat uncomfortably close to Comic Sans. For a company in the design business, that's a problem. The visual system was inconsistent. Marketing looked one way, product another. The tone read generic tech when it should have felt like a creative movement.
Beneath all of that was a harder thing to solve. Most design software feels exclusive. Adobe targets professionals. Canva targets businesses. Both carry a learning curve and a certain implied prerequisite. Picsart's entire point was that anyone could make something, right now, no training required. The brand just didn't say that yet.
Most of Picsart's users lived outside North America. The old approach defaulted to a Western tech aesthetic that didn't reflect who was actually using the product. We needed to build something that felt genuinely global, not just translated.
THE WORK
The starting point wasn't a blank canvas. Picsart users never start with blank canvases either. They start with a photo, then push it somewhere unexpected. We built the brand system the same way.
The wordmark. After a lot of iteration, Shachar landed on something geometric and modern that felt like a natural step forward, not a break from the past. The capitalisation shifted from PicsArt to Picsart. A small change that said a lot about where the company was headed.
The photography. Working with Jacq Harriet, Shachar built a library of vibrant brand imagery that the in-house team could use as raw material, just like the community does. Every image celebrated a subculture or a way of seeing. Gyaru fashion. Ikebana. Beauty experimentation. DJ culture. Not stock photo diversity. Real creative worlds.
The frame system. Picsart's community produces wildly different styles. How do you build visual consistency across that much chaos? We looked to art galleries. Museums hold different artists and movements together through a single device: the frame. Shachar's was a bespoke gradient background generated from three dominant colours pulled from each featured creation. Every piece felt unique. The overall system held together.
The voice. With Hermit, Shachar developed a tone we called the rebel art teacher. A mentor and a misfit. Someone who sees what you're capable of before you do. Not corporate encouragement, not tech company cheerfulness. Something with a bit more edge.
Product integration. Brand designers and product designers worked in the same room from day one. Colours that sang in marketing needed to function in UI. Elements that worked in print couldn't look interactive in-app. The result was a brand that felt coherent from the app icon to the billboard, not two separate systems pretending to be one.
Global by design. Red means different things in different countries. Typography that works in English can fail in other languages. We worked with country managers globally to create bespoke compositions for each market. One brand, genuinely built to be global, not one brand with regional adaptations bolted on afterwards.
THE RESULT
The rebrand landed. Across every surface, at once.
Key outcomes:
4x increase in awareness above industry benchmarks on OOH campaigns
34% uplift in new users embracing account functionality post-launch
Marketing and product felt unified for the first time
Localized executions outperformed one-size-fits-all approaches in every market tested
Artist partnership drops created ongoing return visits and community FOMO
Picsart moved from "photo editing app" to "global creative platform." Not because we said so. Because the brand finally looked the part.
Accessibility doesn't mean amateur. Picsart democratizes design, but 150 million people deserve a brand that looks world-class. We gave them one.
