Letterboxd

As a far as the community of film lovers is concerned, there’s no greater social space than Letterboxd. A decade since its public launch, Letterboxd has maintained its presence as the first and last stop for all cinephiles to share, discuss, and discover film. Almost a decade since then, Letterboxd has left much on the table with minimal updates to its function, features, and identity.

For this project, our team worked from the 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.

The Challenge

Deliver a facelifted Letterboxd experience that accounts for core audience needs without isolating any new or current users.

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

The Result

A product refresh that leverages modern design themes and immerses users in the core functionality of the platform they find most valuable. By offering more obvious pathways to key pages and newly bolstered features, our version of Letterboxd betters the experience of all users:

Critics looking to reach a larger audience, Diarists hoping to flex their film journeys, and Viewers seeking their next favorite film. For each of these users, our updates bring their motivators closer to reality.

Our relaunch campaign, “Film Studies” is a showcase of the new Letterboxd - re-released and remastered. Each campaign activation will embody the education, discovery, or discussion of the academic discipline.

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. Paired with a custom overlaid font that embodies the playfulness of the Letterboxd community. Together they create the foundation for building the Letterboxd brand.

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

In our creative executions, we can harness the power of our custom font to play with hierarchy while 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 will embody this with activations and events that bring the educational and conversational elements of Letterboxd to life outside of the platform itself.

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

Call Sheet

Call Sheet will be Letterboxd’s value add to their diary feature. Diarists will be able to bring their personal film experiences forward. Not only will Call Sheets offer hard-logged viewing hours more visibility, they’re 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 curates film festivals at independent movie theaters all over the country.

Each collection will be city specific and include Q&As with filmmakers. Allowing for in person discussions to occur.

During these festivals Letterboxd will take over the marquee to showcase the new brand.

LetterMAXd

Letterboxd will partner with Max to do an in-app experience where when browsing for films, Max users can see collections of films curated by Letterboxd and an integration where Letterboxd community reviews are added and seen within the Max interface.