Contents
Brand Strategy
What Blinkist and its brand identity stand for.
To make the Blinkist brand shine, it's important to understand what's behind the Blinkist brand. The essentials are found in this six-fold approach:
Core
Our core:
Powerful Ideas
We believe in the power of ideas—for personal growth and broader perspectives
Promise
Our promise and claim:
Understand powerful ideas in 15 minutes
Benefits
Our benefits:
1. Effective understanding
2. Inspiration for personal growth
3. Moments of delight
4. In touch with the world
Reasons to believe
The right content...
• Quality content developed by experts
• Direct collaboration with content creators
...fit for life...
• Fit for any style of life and so much more
...with delight
• Superior narration and a unique audio style
• Fuelling discovery through curation
Positioning
Our positioning in a Blink:
Bite-sized edutainment
Brand house
Consumer Segments
Visual Brand
A guide to the Blinkist identity assets and visual specifications
By using Blinkist’s visual elements—in line with the guidance provided—the brand appears coherent, consistent and appealing:
Art Direction
The Blinkist Art Direction allows the established look and feel to be evoked across all visual interactions with our audience.
The art direction prompts customers to place trust in our product and regard it as a powerful source of knowledge that allows them to aspire to their heights.
We follow three guiding Design Principles to shape the Blinkist look and feel:
1. Simple & Clear
Our art direction leans on simplicity, without being boring. Like the product we offer, our designs are uncomplicated and free from unnecessary noise.
2. Distinctive & Recognizable
Blinkist offers a unique product, qualitative and valuable. The art direction introduces our powerful ideas confidently and consistently across all platforms.
3. Thoughtful & Inviting
Our visual brand is enjoyable and relevant. It's created to attract people and connect with them.
Logo
The Blinkist logo is one of the important visual assets that can be identified uniquely from other competitors. It's recognizable at all sizes across various forms and platforms.
Logo Versions
Typography
It's at the core of our brand.
Our products is made of words and we take pride in shaping our powerful ideas. Typography is influential and we use it to:
1. Convey our user benefits
2. Attract customers
3. Visualize information clearly and easily
4. Convey trustworthiness
Download Cera Pro and Blinkist Serif fonts here:
Typography application
Choosing Typeface
Cera Pro is used to style the Blinkist voice: if Blinkist were a comic character, their speech bubble text would be styled in Cera Pro.
Blinkist Serif is used to style content and content derivates: books, articles, quotes and other pieces of information.
Choosing Font
Typography is an old form of art and it's important to understand how text styling has evolved over time generating paradigms familiar to readers. For this reason, we observe the original styling of established text elements:
Titles/ Headers................Bold
Paragraphs/body............Regular
Book Title.........................Italic
Author...............................Regular/Medium
Quote................................Italic
Color
We use our colors to:
1. Convey our user benefits
2. Attract customers
3. Guide users in the Blinkist experience
4. Set the tone
Download a PDF that summarizes the Blinkist color palette:
Click here to request to be added to the Adobe Library which contains the color palette:
Primary Color Palette
Discovering new topics is a positive experience that we translate with the use of energetic and eye-catching colors. They achieve a bold, confident look and feel, and bring distinctiveness and enthusiasm to our art direction.
Spotlight color
Blinkist Green is reserved for important actions and special places (like CTAs and the logo). We avoid using Blinkist Green in less essential components and designs. This way, users can detect right away what is important, and associate it with relevant feelings.
Color Combinations
Instead of mixing tints randomly and using too many vivid colors together, we identified the following three color combinations to style our designs.
Sales
Use this color combination wherever you want to attract viewers and prompt them to perform an action.
Informative
Use this color combination wherever you want to engage or inform users.
Warm
Use this color combination wherever you want to convey warm feelings.
Background colors
You can use the following background colors for each color combination, as well as pale mint grey, midnight blue, and white as backgrounds.
Other Colors
Besides our main brand colors, we can also use colors derived from the Blink, Shortcast, and Collection cover colors. These colors come mainly from the original covers of the books and podcasts.
We can use these colors in all marketing and branding assets, but we should aim to always use at least one of our main brand colors as well in the composition.
Legibility
It’s important that all text and icon elements have enough contrast with their background so that everyone can easily read us.
For this reason, we encourage you to download color contrast tools to use when selecting colors.
Please keep color contrast always in mind!
Remember: yellow and green never pass the contrast test on white/light backgrounds!
Color application
Editorial Illustration
Editorial illustrations at Blinkist are thoughtful and aimed to establish an emotional connection with viewers. They help with a quick and effective understanding of ideas and portray the content clearly.
Illustrations are there to:
1. Convey our user benefits
2. Attract customers
3. Visualize complex or abstract information
4. Create an emotional connection with viewers
What are the guidelines?
Editorial illustrations can be made by different artists.
The main purpose of editorial illustrations is to offer a clear visual representation of the content and to elevate our brand with witty, smart visualizations that evoke emotion.
This is more important than the actual style of the illustration.
Of course, they should also follow our design principles and convey our user benefits. They should be simple, clear, distinctive, and inviting. Illustrations are styled with Blinkist's color palette.
They aren't playful or childish and should aim to connect to a mature audience.
Where do we use editorial illustrations?
We use them wherever we show curated content. Some examples of these are collection covers, editorial weekly emails, in-app editorial cards, marketing assets showcasing content, etc.
We should be purposeful and use a light hand when using illustrations—especially in places where we need to visualize complex or abstract information; or when we want to give add a warm, welcoming, and human feeling to our design.
An example of this could be a welcome to Blinkist email, or in the onboarding of the app where we showcase some value propositions.
Where do we NOT use editorial illustrations?
We don’t want to use these illustrations to fill an empty space or to be ornaments. Illustrations have a purpose and feel thoughtful. For this reason, we do not use them in empty states, sale campaigns, transactional emails, product updates and places recurrent places.
Illustration Application
Shapes
Our shapes are both a complementary and supplementary tool used to enhance, highlight and support the key design elements of our visual brand.
They are used to:
1. Highlight and frame design elements
2. Add background depth
3. Mask photos
Click here to request to be added to the Adobe Library which contain the shapes:
How to use the shapes
Our shapes should always enhance and complement a layout. They are rarely the focus or primary feature of any visual.
Some layouts may require a more simple form, for these cases a square or circle may be appropriate.
When choosing a shape, consider both the messaging of the creative in relation to the Blinkist values, and the purpose the shape will serve in your layout.
Creative applications using scale, color and rotation are encouraged.
To add a softer, more human touch to our shapes, a corner radius of 2° has been added.
Shape application
Icons
The Blinkist icons are an essential element in our product: They convey universal messages in an instant. When using icons outside of the product, please keep in mind the following guidelines:
1. Icons should only be used for lower-priority information or if space is limited and a visual is required
2. If a page has a lot of visual content (such as photos or illustrations), icons may be used alongside lower-priority content
3. Illustration takes preference over icons, as they transmit more emotion and better represent the brand
4. Icons should be used at small scale. An icon should never be scaled up to fill a large space. In this case, use a spot illustration instead
5. Icons should be in a single, neutral colour to match the way they are used within the product (i.e. not with a dot behind them)
Click here to request to be added to the Adobe Library which contains the icons:
Visit the Video Book:
Visit the Storytelling Book:
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