Pandora redrew its 'P' for the first time since the iPhone era

Overhaul the brand in the middle of Pandora's busiest, most transformative year since its pivot to streaming 12 years earlier: a new product model, a cofounder back as CEO, and a brand that had barely changed since the 2008 iPhone app.

Shed the serifed blue 'P' for a fatter sans-serif P with no counter, picked from 1,000+ iterations — a revolutionary, not evolutionary, year.

Executive creative director Julie Scelzo and VP of design Tony Calzaretta led the in-house team through more than 1,000 versions of the new 'P', which replaced the home-screen icon for the first time since 2008, anchored a new animated splash screen, and extended into marketing and the real-world concert environments Pandora curates.

The new icon reached users' home screens in 2016, with the identity set to carry the brand into the formal announcement of its on-demand Spotify competitor later that year.

Julie Scelzo's first project as Pandora's new executive creative director was hardly gentle: overhaul the brand in the busiest, most transformative year since the company pivoted to streaming music 12 years earlier. Pandora was morphing from an internet radio app into an on-demand service, under a new CEO — cofounder Tim Westergren, the closest thing the product had to a father.

The company had refreshed its logo three years earlier, but only as a subtle typographic tweak. This time, Scelzo said, they wanted something revolutionary, not evolutionary. The answer: a fatter, sans-serif 'P' without a counter, replacing the dark blue serifed 'P' that had been Pandora's symbol — a change casual users might miss, but which millions of long-time listeners would find hard to miss.

The mark went through more than 1,000 iterations before being finalized. It began appearing on home screens in 2016, the first icon change since Pandora arrived on the iPhone in 2008, and carried into an animated splash screen, marketing materials and the real-world concert environments Pandora increasingly curated.

VP of design Tony Calzaretta, hired as Pandora's first product designer nearly 11 years earlier, said the brand had not evolved while the service spread from browser radio to phones, tablets, smart speakers, TVs and cars — and that this identity would help transform everything the company did ahead of its formal on-demand launch.

The identity change was timed to certify the business-model pivot, not to decorate it.

Removing the counter from the P made the mark bolder at app-icon sizes across a growing hardware fleet.

An in-house team meant the people designing the brand were the ones building the product every day.

Rebrand at the moment your company's business model changes, so the identity change certifies the strategy instead of decorating it.

The rebrand preceded Pandora's on-demand relaunch later in 2016; the source reports no subscriber figures.