Malthe Sigurdsson was the design force behind Skype's playful, cute, and colorful visual identity. It's rare when the emotions, the times, the technology, and the user experience meet well. Skype's form and function, and visual iconography surrounding it, defined Skype.
Before Skype's message of "it just works" could be accepted, people had to trust Skype. At a glance, people believed it was possible. One look and they believed turning their PC into a magic Internet telephone was easy, simple, painless, fun, exciting, safe, immediate.
Malthe instigated one of the most effective and enduring global brands of the decade.
From a 2006 recruiting post...
The coolest thing about being at Skype is that I'm helping to give away this fantastic thing of people in separate corners of the world, the country, the city or indeed just the house, being able to talk to each other... for free.
I'm in charge of design and branding at Skype, and since the above is our core product, I have a really easy job: do the opposite of what every big, boring, customer-unfriendly corporation in the world would do, and make sure that every single little task is done with the millions of people using Skype in mind. If it's not good for them, it's bad for Skype.
Having been here since forever, since we were me sitting in my apartment in Paris, some guys in London and a small office in Tallinn, it's tremendously cool to still be sitting here, now in London, and with offices on most continents and users in even more places, seeing it all grow so much, so fast, so well.
In closing: Please come work with us. It's fun, it absolutely makes a difference, and you and the hundreds of other smart people working here will do great stuff.
Take a look at Malthe's slides from Reboot 7 in 2005 and Stuart Henshall's thoughts on Skype's brand two years in.
And then read through Malthe's July 2005 essay, A new face, for a walkthrough of the Skype's language and visual elements.
The Sigurdssons are now on Project Hector. Congratulations!
tags: skype, creative, brand, design, people, dk, marketing, identity, emotion, malthe, sigurdsson, malthesigurdsson
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Labels: alumni, design, news, people, skype
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