Eventbrite (2018)Copied

By 2018 Eventbrite described itself as the world's largest ticketing and experience management platform, with millions of events created every year. It had just acquired the ticket distribution service Ticketfly and was preparing to go public. It asked an outside design studio to develop a brand that would reinforce the impact of the share sale.

The answer was evolution rather than replacement. According to GDUSA, the identity built on Eventbrite's existing equity and added ingredients only where needed for distinctive marketing and a richer digital experience. The key additions were an animated wordmark and a short-form e, so the brand could be identified at any scale.

Photography got its own principles. The event sits at the heart of the new style, captured from the perspective of creators and attendees rather than as stock crowd shots. The studio also developed digital concepts to make Eventbrite more of an online destination for events, working with Eventbrite's creative team on user experience flows to show how the website could become more engaging.

The IPO went well: GDUSA reported an implied valuation above 1.76 billion dollars and first-day gains that made it one of the biggest opening days of the year. Whether a brand refresh had anything to do with that is another question. French trade title MGB Mag noticed the change in October and found it so subtle it nearly missed it: no more capital E, a typeface it called extremely close to Google's and a slightly darker orange, all rolled out in September without any announcement from Eventbrite.

The approach was sensible for a company about to face investors: nothing that looked like a reinvention, plenty that looked like maturity. A short-form e is overdue for any platform that lives on phone screens, and putting real events at the centre of the photography is the right instinct for a ticketing brand. It is a competent tidy-up rather than a memorable identity.