# Transcript: Designing for Fandom: Where Brand Meets Belonging

**Date:** March 18, 2026 · 10:30 PM  
**Session:** [Designing for Fandom: Where Brand Meets Belonging](/sessions/2026-03-18/pp1162620-designing-for-fandom-where-brand-meets-belonging)

## Summary

This fireside chat explores how brands create authentic connections with passionate fan communities through thoughtful design systems. Norman Rabinovich from Crunchyroll and speakers from Buck design studio share case studies on designing for anime, gaming, and esports audiences, demonstrating how visual identity, motion systems, and character design can build belonging rather than just brand awareness.

## Topics

`brand design` · `fandom` · `anime culture` · `gaming` · `esports` · `motion systems` · `visual identity` · `crunchyroll rebrand` · `character design` · `community building` · `cultural authenticity`

## Key Takeaways

1. Fandoms demand authenticity: Design systems must demonstrate deep understanding of subculture references and visual language to earn trust from passionate communities who will quickly call out inauthenticity.
2. Crunchyroll's rebrand focused on creating a 'glyph system' inspired by manga techniques (screen tone, effect lines, expressions) that evolved from letter forms into flexible design elements, allowing the brand to communicate in the visual language of anime itself.
3. Character mascots can become main characters: Crunchyroll transformed Hime from a mascot into a fully-developed character with backstory, friends, and narrative arcs, creating content that gives fans glimpses into her world rather than using her to sell products.
4. Motion systems should function like a dialect or accent: Riot Games' League of Legends seasonal brands maintain behavioral consistency while allowing flexibility, ensuring the brand feels authentic to fans across different regions and cultural contexts.
5. Living brands require comprehensive toolkits: Design systems for fan communities need deep expression systems and motion principles that allow teams to communicate at scale across all channels while maintaining authenticity and never repeating themselves.

## Full Transcript

My name is Ben Maxwell. I'm the Chief Design Officer at Department Cool, and we're going to take you through some of our work, some of our thinking for both brands, and then answer some questions.

First of all, welcome. Thank you for being here. You guys have made your way to one of the highest fan affinity brands in the world. As Vice President of Creative Services at Crunchyroll, I get to talk about the fonts all day long. Our focus within the creative group is really simple, and that's to create a great experience. As a business, most people look at us as a streaming platform, but we're actually so much more than a streaming platform. We're really a fandom business, and we show up where our fans are. We try to create experiences within all the different areas, everything from events to theatrical releases to games, consumer products, collectibles, news. We also just launched a digital marketing program. It's more about where the fans are and where we ultimately want to be.

What I wanted to do is take you through our rebrand. We basically did a brand refresh about a year and change ago, and I want to tell you a little bit about the way we were thinking about this brand refresh and the components that make up the brand that are inherently tied to the notion of fandom and the authenticity of fandom as it relates to both anime, Japanese culture, and our fandom here from a Western perspective.

The brand system for Crunchyroll is really comprised of these particular elements: typography, design systems, tone of voice, manga illustrations that incorporate into the brand, a glyph system which I'm going to get into, textures and patterns, the mnemonic or sonic branding thanks to our friends at Buck, and Hime, our main character. I'm not going to go through all of the pieces, even though I really want to talk about the type.

We did shift the logo a bit. We made some modifications to the overall symbol and actually redesigned the letter forms in it. Here's the thing that's pretty interesting: when I first got to the company, there wasn't one definitive answer as to what the logo was. Some people thought it was an eye, some people thought it was a sushi roll. There were all these different variations. We actually started to go deep and do some research, and we got in contact with the original founder of Crunchyroll, and he validated for us that the goal was to be an eye. So what we did with the focus of the rebrand was really focused on giving the eye more personality and personifying it so that it actually functions as its own icon, so that people would see and understand that it is really more an eye symbol than anything else.

I talked a little bit about our glyph system. This is, I think, one of the most interesting parts of our entire rebrand. We wanted to capture manga and anime, and we took different themes within manga and anime and incorporated them into what we're calling glyphs. Initially, it started out with just letter forms. We took different topics, such as expressions that you see in manga. We played around with this notion of hyperbole. We had definitive techniques that we were bringing from manga itself. We had representations of action effects, and then we also had onomatopoeia, which is a big part of it. We started to apply these to the redesign of each of the letter forms.

This was our first batch stylistically that we created. We had effect lines and screen tone, which are much more in tune with manga. We had flames, which are representative of action. We basically built out a full letter form alphabet that we would be incorporating in the way that we communicate. It got to the point where we were actually using the letter forms as design elements, as opposed to just the glyphs within the statements. So instead of cheating the system by cropping in on the corner of elements, we actually went as far as just redesigning and taking the same themes and designing a ton of different symbols for the brand that function in much the same way. They're not necessarily tied to a specific letter form.

Tone of voice for us is actually a really important thing, and to get it right is challenging in a lot of ways, because it has to encompass all the qualities of quirkiness and mischievousness that make up our brand. There also has to be a nod to certain things. For instance, I love the tagline "Beware the Machines." For those of you that know anime, there's a pretty well-known anime called "Reincarnated as a Vending Machine" about a vending machine repairman who's driving, falls off the side of a cliff, dies and gets reincarnated as a vending machine. Some of the stories are wild.

Another big part of the brand was the manga illustrations, the patterns and the textures. These are used as secondary devices for us to create graphic framing devices, not necessarily being overt with the actual content within it, but getting across the emotion and the feeling associated with what you get from looking at manga. We commissioned four manga artists in Japan to develop four different pieces that we started off with for the rebrand. We're actually doing a lot more now. We did one that was action based, we did a mecha one, an independent art piece, and you can see how we've started to incorporate it into the brand, where it becomes more textural and more evocative and more emotive.

The sonic branding. Basically, the sound and the visual that pops up before each of the shows. We worked with Buck really closely on defining this particular piece. I'm going to show you the piece, and then I'm going to extrapolate all the individual sounds associated with it. The general idea was that we wanted to conceptually relay how a fan goes through all the different series and genres of what Crunchyroll can provide as a brand. Because within the context of anime, anime is a medium. We all have individual personal interests: romance, action. So we created all these different bands, and it becomes richer and more robust.

What we ended up doing with the sound language: since we had this whole glyph system, we actually created sounds for each of the glyphs, which was really fun. We have fire, water, motion, shock, attack. We created it that way, and then we put it together. We have all the glyph components, then we have the harmony of the piece, the sound of the impact, and then the crunch. How could we not include the crunch? And then here it is all together.

Our final component is our main character. For those of you that are familiar with Crunchyroll, we had a mascot for many years. Her name is Hime. During this process, what we wanted to do was shift her away from being a mascot to her being the main character. That basically meant redefining her a little bit. We went through the process of recreating her, giving her a full backstory, giving her some friends, and then slowly starting the process of developing out these mini stories. We don't work with Hime as though she's selling the product of Crunchyroll. We work with her from the perspective of us having a glimpse into her life and the things that she does. She's a representation of anime for us. A lot of the use cases come when we can't use IP for things; we can use Hime as a representation.

We worked with a lot of really talented Japanese illustrators, anime directors, creators, production companies to get the right form and backstory for her. Hime lives between two worlds. I'm not going to get too much into the lore, because we're slowly starting to roll out these stories through our social channels. But to give you the top level: she lives between two worlds. One is an anime world, and one is the human world. In the anime world, she is a fox yokai, which means she's a spirit and a shape shifter. She can change different forms. She is 112 years old. Her favorite form has these battle forms. In the human world, she's a college student.

This is a representation of the actual anime world that we're building out, with different genres as different lands within the space. Hime has a sister named Sudachi. Sudachi is younger, she's 100 years old. She's kind of like Penny to Inspector Gadget. She just gets everything done. She can rewire a car. She has great capabilities. They also have this cat. Very cute. He doesn't talk, and he has all the cat-like qualities that cats exhibit. But he can also drive a car.

We rolled out Hime several months ago and started out by creating a Hime Lo-Fi Beats channel. If you want to go on YouTube, we have different tracks created with different artists. You just see her rolling out on her bike, and we're going to be refreshing this consistently. We started building out little social snippets that we've been releasing periodically through social, giving glimpses into her world and what she's into. Obviously, her scooter is an important part.

We've also just recently done a partnership with Delta. Anybody that flew Delta coming out here might have seen Hime on the chair in the back. Part of the promotions, Hime has been part of the Delta branding from the airport, even the Delta lounge. It's really important for us to be authentic to the brand, to understand the different components and pieces within it. So you have little Easter eggs here and there. In this context, there's an Easter egg with Hime sitting behind someone on the plane. We also launched a brand campaign a couple of months ago called the Ordinary campaign. This was almost like the first real relaunch of her on a global level.

I'm not going to talk a lot about Buck because we are a design company. We really sit between strategy and craft. We've been around for about 21 years, and our goal is really to tell our partners' stories and help them communicate clearly, authentically across any channel that they exist on. These days, it's global. I think what we've begun to really tap into with brands is some of the biggest moments, some of the biggest challenges, and help navigate them through that. I'm going to show a range of things, everything from motion systems to storytelling to some film work to some brand work that all taps into the nuances of brand as a signal of care and understanding of their audience in a deep, meaningful way.

I'm going to start with Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge. This was a project that came in where the goal was to spend zero budget, and in doing so, you have to tap into a level of fandom that really transcends people who are looking for something or who want to find something. We took that as the impetus to develop this activation where there's a bug on the home screen of the app that you can click into and it will take you to this command center where they oversee the park in 1995. It was a way back when, a lore reveal. This is when the park was fully functioning and clean, and it was a really nice place to be for a lot of people.

It ran for 42 days, and it was a 24-hour content stream. We used Unreal Engine and some generative crowd simulation tools to create an unlimited amount of content. It literally was on all day, and then we animated about 18 unique moments that became these triggers for people to discover how everyone became so angry and killed each other. This log was the hint. You could look at this log and find some Easter eggs. They could find a timestamp. We didn't have to do any work. We just basically showed that this thing existed, and the culture went wild. They found all these moments because they went to certain time codes. That would get released online, and people would share it, and it just became this buzz where millions of pieces of content came up on YouTube to amplify the story that we just helped guide people through. This, to me, feels like one of those moments that shows you that the audience is passionate. They care. They want to understand. They want to find out why they fell in love with the game in the first place, and this was the first time they really told that backstory in a way that people really connected with.

The next one is esports. Hugely passionate fan base somewhere between theatrics and gaming, and there's an anime subculture too. There's so much wrapped into this world. How do you speak really authentically to that? We've worked with Riot for a bunch of years on spots, campaigns, some brand systems. But this year was a clear moment for them where they wanted to have the League of Legends esports events be rebooted every year. Everyone has a different theme, a different story, different lore that's baked into the game, but they wanted them to be connected. So we built them both at the same time this year as one universal system.

You can see how they express differently for different moments. The Mid-Season Invitational is about regional competition. It's about who's going to arise, who's going to come with the fire to make it to the next level. We wanted to really embody that. We didn't have any key visuals to play with. We were given assets from them, but the design system, the textural system, is what we developed. For Worlds, we got to work on the key visuals. We had to bring these new characters to life, and then the weapon that came about. This one is about being legendary. This is the Super Bowl. This is about, will you become a legend? Will you be remembered? So it has a very different energy. It's a little bit more structural, a little bit more intentional.

When you break it down, we brought these color systems to life, something that had these undertones of fire and intensity, but they had to have this flexibility as you'll start to see as we build up, because this has to be their online presence in the space for the event itself and all the materials. The source of truth gets spread across all of their partners and all of the mechanisms that really present Worlds. It's a lot crisper, a lot colder, a lot more stoic.

Then you get into the motion systems behind them. It looks a little chaotic, but there's a highly detailed structure behind all of this. Motion principles are baked in. When we build a lot of these tools, we're trying to build what we think of as living brands, where they have to have the complexity to be able to speak at any altitude in any way. But you can't just give someone guidelines and expect them to know how to do it. So we build toolkits. We build these really deep expression systems that allow them to communicate at scale over the full course of the year.

These little details, the layers and type animation that can really be elastic, there are experience principles behind it. They had to have this living and breathing thing always kind of present within the brand expression. You have to be able to work in Korean and Chinese. You have to be able to translate across cultures, and each one of these fan bases will call bullshit if you're wrong. You have to get it right.

There's this background, this living, breathing element. We had four or five different ways it's expressed that are more smooth, more erratic, but this one is more circular, really tapping into gameplay strategy as part of this expressive layer. That range gives teams the flexibility to be able to work within an environment for the broadcast that feels extremely flexible, energetic, confident, and yet it never repeats itself.

For Worlds, we're exerting confidence. It's a little bit more pristine, a little bit more focused. They're introducing this new weapon as part of the lore, and it played a big part of it. We came up with this highly detailed 4K or 16K asset that you can crop into and explore. We also got to work on the key visuals of the two characters for the season and played with season and story. You start to see that stacked up, layered on itself, putting legendary players with legendary characters, and starting to implant the idea of being remembered. Here's that all coming together, stacked up.

Also in the gaming community, Sims has been around forever, and it's just like a weird kind of wonderful. It's extremely erratic. A lot of modding, a lot of just, who knows what's going to happen there. How do you build a motion system? Collins did a rebrand with them, and then they brought us on to build up a full comprehensive motion system. Collins built a really expressive brand that's quirky and matches the vibe. So how do we bring the layer into that story?

We did what we always do, which is try to find the foundational principles of what we're trying to communicate. We talk about motion and behavior almost as like a dialect or an accent. It's a way of speaking. It's a sentence structure. If you have a person who changes their accent every three months, you might be like, what's going on? You need consistency. So we really try to make sure that there's consistency with flexibility in the way that they communicate.

We use the playful bounce. It's always been a big part of the game. It's always fun. It's expressive. It's very bouncy. There are unexpected details, the modding, the kind of weird UI component to it. You're shifting. You're selecting something new. It has that bounce to it, the cheeky creativity. This is when people are leaving their house on fire. There's lots of fun you can have in the game. And there's the obvious time aspect. The classic: speed up time and see what happens. So that has its own behavioral principles.

What that looks like coming together in a system is something like this, where it's playful, it's functional, it's legible, but it's constantly evolving and has extremely varied parts.

Another shift in tone is the same client, a different game. This is right when they shifted from an in-house game that they were going to make themselves. Uncommon did the rebrand, and we worked on the system as well. We really wanted to play into the sport. There's a lot of use of triangles in the design system that has to do with the strategy of defensive and offensive play. The rhythm of it was based on how a football match is kind of erratic in the way it ebbs and flows. There's a constant two steps forward, one step back to the gameplay. That came through all of the behavior of the motion system. You start to feel the rhythm that feels truly authentic to teams, to fans and players alike. It's a fun way to just embody some of the experience of the fan into the way that the brand expresses.

Now we're going to shift more into content. Brand and content are blurry these days, and I think what we're known for at Buck is being able to work across all of that. We definitely think of ourselves as creative omnivores, where we can work in experiential or digital, or film or cinematic. We're obsessive about the craft.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5*

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