When you think of design, what comes to mind?
At Powder, design means two things :
- Brand design — design of all the imagery and graphical elements that make up our brand and are reflected in our external communication (e.g. website, ads, blog). Its purpose: to create a distinct visual identity for a brand that is recognisable and appealing.
- Product design (UX/UI) — design of our digital products (i.e. software architecture, typography, buttons, imagery), including mobile and PC apps. The goal: to create aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use interfaces.
We think of two as two sides of the spectrum, which overlap to some extent but are quite different in terms of the creative process and workflow. Brand design starts with an unexplored terrain, a tabula rasa, where imagination and creativity can flow freely, blending a range of influences. By contrast, product design follows the more precise rules to navigate between user needs and engineering requirements.
We interviewed our brand and product designers, Thomas Vimare and Hugo des Gayets, to understand the exact workflow behind it. Through their eyes, you’ll explore how we came up with our look, what it takes to design software and why collaboration is at the heart of design at Powder.
# BRAND DESIGN with Thomas Vimare
“Powder’s visual identity was inspired by a wide range of influences. Our goal was to create a brand that feels ‘pop’ and trendy, appealing to an audience raised on visually rich gaming experiences. At the same time, we wanted to give Powder a ‘premium’ feel to disassociate our brand from the historically ‘geeky’ notion of gaming. We’ve always perceived gaming as a mainstream, not a niche phenomenon, which had to be conveyed through our brand imagery as well.
So, we picked a black background as a default — it feels classy and allows for bold, vivid elements to be added on top. If you look at our visual assets, there’s alway some vibrant colour present — it’s a really rich palette. We use bright, sometimes fluorescent, hues of pink, green, purple, as well as a rainbow gradient, to inject some dynamic and give our images character. In a nutshell, our colors are what gives Powder its personality.
Gaming characters and camouflage elements were also thrown into the mix, as direct reference to the most popular first-person-shooters like CoD and Fortnite, which the majority of our users play and recognise at first glance. Immediately, the audience knew we were a gaming brand.
Being an essential part of the gaming culture, emotes and stickers (with jargon, as well as industrial, cyberpunk symbols) for the editor were also introduced, and helped our brand affirm its cultural relevance — to speak the same language as the users.
You’ll notice quite a lot of graphic elements in our communications that allude to the history of gaming. We’ve experimented with retro gaming symbols, e.g CDs, keyboard buttons, situated in the contemporary digitized, pixelated context.
We were also quite influenced by other media, including TV and SVOD platforms. With its themed channels, MTV in particular served as an inspiration for the Powder Original series we introduced at some point.
While a lot of the elements I describe have become a foundational part of our brand book, brand design is really an ongoing exploration. Every new project we launch is a microcosm within the overall visual universe of Powder, which requires a tailored approach. Besides, the gaming market is evolving so fast, in terms of both content and technological trends, that we need to adapt our vision accordingly to keep it fresh and make sure it doesn’t feel outdated. In that sense, approaching this as a team is very important. Our visual language has really emerged out of constant collaboration between our in-house product and content teams, as well as freelancers brought in for specific missions.
# PRODUCT DESIGN with Hugo des Gayets
“Product design, particularly in gaming, is of course creative by definition. As we’re constantly innovating with our product and adding new features, there’s always room to experiment with the way things look. But it’s also a very precise process. I work closely with our engineering team, and my workflow follows the specific rules dictated by the softwares we work with. Less like art and more like engineering, it’s an inherently feedback-driven process.
When designing a new feature, we must take into account three key factors:
- User needs: what problem are we solving?
- Engineering capabilities: what is the best way to solve the problem with the technical resources we have?
- Business agenda: how do we prioritize features given our global strategy?
In a way, it’s about finding the right balance between all of the above to build a feature that is easy to use, technically feasible and fits into the overall product pipeline we have at a given moment.
In our workflow, we tend to follow some of the ‘classical’ phases of UX / UI design, aimed at streamlining in-app navigation and rolling out new features at a fast pace:
- Research: identifying a problem / user need based on feedback gathered through 1–1 interviews and product reviews. This phase may often include market research and benchmarking — to understand how others tackle the problem? This requires a broad definition of a competitor: we’re not not just looking at the gaming market, but rather at apps and social media trends generally. Having gathered all the information, we define an ideal user journey, with all its key touchpoints, and sketch out concrete solutions to be tested.
- Prototyping: creating demos in Figma, i.e. mockup interfaces to test the user journey based on the research as well as technical feasibility. Very close collaboration between product designers and engineers is needed to ensure, at every step of the way, that the feature can be delivered within deadlines (we work in sprints). The more risky the feature (i.e. we’re unsure how it is going to be received by the user), the more high-fidelity the prototype must be to anticipate use cases and pain points. The final stage here is to test the prototype internally, as well as with a focus group of users.
- Implementation: where our engineers are building the feature. From here, the role of a product designer is more supervisory: I follow up on the progress to make sure the final outcome corresponds to the initial vision. Despite all the research we do, there can sometimes be ‘bad surprises’ — the feature may need iteration if engagement metrics indicate poor reception of the feature.
Today, we have a broad portfolio of products, which is very exciting. We get to experiment with software ranging from mobile apps, to PC recorders, to plug-ins. We get to build products from scratch and improve on our core products like the mobile app constantly. So, product design here is truly diverse, which requires a holistic strategy, involving tech, design and growth teams. The fact that the Powder app allows for universal sourcing of clips — from console, PlayStation, PC and mobile — adds an additional layer of complexity, which I enjoy a lot.
With every project, we try to benefit as much as possible from our Design System, which is our library of key interface components. The goal is to make as much use of these building blocks as possible to minimise engineering hours and have the final product rolled out efficiently.
All in all, while it may be close to engineering, product design is not an exact science. Even when we have all the research and user feedback available, it’s not always clear what the best technical solution should be. In that sense, UX / UI design is an art of sorts, where one needs to anticipate the needs that users themselves have not necessarily articulated. If you want to build a truly successful product, say an app, you need to find that perfect formula where the users will go “ah, I really didn’t think of this before, but now that it’s there, my life is so much easier and more exciting” — and that is both on macro and micro levels. A lot of ingredients are needed to make that happen, but I think that as long as we keep learning and innovating at the pace we’ve had so far, the resulting product will continue to make a meaningful difference for the creators.
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