BUNDLE DESIGN
UI VISUAL DESIGN | DEC 2024 - FEB 2025
As the lead Visual Designer on the project, I was tasked with leading the design for the Starz + Max Bundle, a collaborative initiative between Starz, Max, and Amazon. The goal was to create a seamless and visually compelling experience that showcased both brands equally across multiple platforms. With a tight timeline over the holidays to launch in the New Year. My role also involved designing promotional assets for Amazon Fire TV, Prime Video, and DSP ads, ensuring a cohesive and engaging user experience that spanned both the streaming interface and digital ad campaigns.
The primary challenge was to balance the visual representation of two powerful brands—Starz and Max—across a unified user interface. These were our main challenges below :
I worked closely with design, product, and marketing teams from Starz, Max, and Amazon to understand each brand’s unique needs. This alignment was crucial for ensuring consistent messaging and design across all touch points. There were frequent check ins pertaining to template updates and platform capabilities, as well as changes and wait times for popular titles that would make or break the bundle’s success.
In regards to the design process, I would say Amazon’s main objective was to maintain an elevated look for their platform. Since Amazon hosts a number of offers and third party companies - They have established specific rules and direction to ensure the creative is accessible and appealling. For Max and Starz, we shared equal concern with wanting the design to be engaging to drive sign ups. As well as prevent either company from getting lost in the shuffle. Our KA needed to shine and design with templating in mind for versioning.
We first needed to come up with the look and feel for our bundle. We felt that marrying the bright accent colors of each brand would be the best direction. I developed a number of concepts that respected the distinct identities of both Starz and Max. Overall, the focus typically needs to be on the Key Art to entice and convince potential users to sign up - since the value is in the abundance of Max and Starz content. It can often be tempting to feel like you need to reinvent the wheel with each project, but it’s important to remember that the KA will speak for itself. Creating something that is bright, clean, and dynamic will always be successful.
The area I did feel called to explore were frames that houses each KA. I tried to put an eye catching spin on each iteration. Below you’ll see some of my initial ideas :
In the end, me and my AD blended a few of my concepts together. Pivoting in the end to a blade type idea with slanted lines instead of the curved. Using curved frames and Max blue felt unfair to Starz. Max blue was elected to be the primary color with Starz chartreuse as a striking lens flare between each KA. To keep things equally represented, we pushed the Starz logo to utilize their gradient. This made the logos stand apart from each other while giving each brand their moment to pop. This design married the brands together and made it feel like one; as opposed to two brands existing side by side. With this direction, we also added burned logos to each KA so users would be able to have quick reference to the shows.
Once the look and feel was nailed down, we could begin producing rapid concepts and mockups for each Phase, This was followed by swift feedback loops with stakeholders to ensure timely approvals. There was lots of collaboration in this step; changing copy, placeholders for Key Art, ebbing legal, requesting updated templates, etc.
Often the unsung work of design is the sheer number of assets that need to be handled with tender love and care. Depending on what point of the design process you’re in, that’s 129 files that need updating for any and every slight tweak requested across 3 teams at 3 different companies. It’s all part of the job but that did make some days and deadlines challenging when you’re trying to keep your checklist straight.
It truly was a full scope project from conception to the final deliverables; requiring excellent teamwork and some sacrifices to our holiday schedules.
It's always satisfying to see your hard work on a platform that reaches millions of people! You can view all the combination of titles we delivered here. Below is a summarization of Phase 2 with our 4-up title versions.
