The Official Charts, the UK’s most prestigious music chart platform, recently unveiled a refreshed visual identity and new digital music platform to celebrate 70 years of charting the country’s biggest hits. The rebrand aims to make the Official Charts more digitally focused and competitive with music streaming giants like Spotify while still highlighting its unique position as an ‘antidote to the heavily personalized algorithm bubbles of today’.
A New Look for a New Era
The refreshed branding, developed by design agency Electric Mustard, features an updated logo, vibrant color palette, and stylish typography to give the Official Charts a fresher, more youthful feel. The brand now boasts an updated color palette of cobalt blue, pink, and off-white. A suite of fun, brightly-colored digital stickers and emojis, contrasted with a warm off-white base, helps to position the brand in its target sweet spot of ‘Gen Z with a hint of nostalgia’. The signature ‘arrows and 1’ icon has also been updated, now hollowing out the Number 1 and rotating it to align with the now-iconic Number 1 Award.
The previous primary color palette of cyan and magenta has been replaced with shades of cobalt blue, pink, and off-white to create a more modern look. The former compressed typography gave the brand a ‘business-like and stuffy’ vibe according to Electric Mustard. It has been replaced with a stylish yet readable Graphik font.
A Digital Music Database
In addition to the visual rebrand, the Official Charts launched a new digital music platform that aims to become one of the world’s largest publicly accessible music databases. The all-new OfficialCharts.com platform delivers a newly-expanded interactive chart archive, the deepest public music database ever published, as part of the web development by Full Fat Things. The ‘Artists’ section has been doubled in size, surfacing a never-before-seen view of the chart success of more than 50,000 artists. A new ‘Songs & Albums’ section also features every hit that ever charted, allowing users to see the performance of any release across both the main Singles and Albums’ Top 100, as well as the 50+ breakdown charts compiled weekly by the Official Charts Company. Through the platform, users can browse through every chart from the 70-year history of the Official Charts, explore audio clips and video content about each charting song, and learn more about music trends throughout history.
Final Thoughts
With its fresh new look and unparalleled access to music chart data, the Official Charts has solidified its status as the authority on charting the UK’s most popular songs. The rebrand and new digital platform reinforce the Official Charts’ role as both a historical record and a platform for discovering music in the present day. Overall, the updates position the brand well for continued success in an increasingly digital media landscape.
