Paramount's new home for pop culture is designed to move at the speed of content

Paramount has worked with New York-based branding and design studio Trollbäck+Company to design Mixible, a new platform specially designed to keep up with the speed of pop culture and all of the content it produces.

Described as an "always-on" platform, Mixible is a digital offshoot of Paramount's other entertainment brands, specifically its flagship Hollywood program Entertainment Tonight and ET Live.

And while there's still a place for these platforms, Mixible will target more topical news and gossip instead. Think of it as a content blender that will constantly mix entertainment and celebrity coverage from across Paramount's portfolio into one easily consumable content smoothie.

Like the stories it covers, Mixible will have an eclectic design. Specially created by Trollbäck+Company, Mixible boasts a hypnotic, playful aesthetic that suitably captures the kaleidoscopic nature of the content it reports on. Distinctive, upbeat and entertaining, it's like the opposite of doom-scrolling.

Bo Bishop, executive director of creative strategy at Trollbäck+Company, says: "With media giants consolidating their content under their own digital umbrellas, flexible, genre-based brands are increasingly important.

"What we've achieved with Mixible is something that's fun, punchy and refreshing – a pop culture hub that's elastic enough to work across Paramount's entire portfolio while maintaining its unique identity."

At the heart of this design is a clean and simple typographic logo with a surprising twist. Instead of being the right way up, the lower case i is inverted to turn it into an exclamation mark. What better way to sum up the delight and enthusiasm of the offbeat, game-changing platform?

If you look closely, you'll also see that the X between the 'i' and the '!' form a natural symmetry. It gives Mixible an elastic reach, allowing it to stretch and adapt to different design opportunities and fit seamlessly anywhere in the cultural landscape.

"The result is a unique identity that attracts audiences' attention," says Erin Kilkenny, Associate Creative Director at Trollbäck+Company. "It's also incredibly malleable, a deliberate ploy which opens the brand up to endless animated and graphical possibilities which can be exploited to create dynamic on-screen visuals."

One of the sneaky ways Mixible attracts attention is by keeping colour to a minimum. Whereas it must have been tempting to go for a saturated, overloaded palette, Mixible keeps things simple with a black and white striped aesthetic which pulls viewers in with its deceptive simplicity.

This choice of colours also acts as a suitable neutral backdrop for other Paramount brands to be projected onto effortlessly and without the risk of them being drowned out. In other words, Mixible has the freedom to be as vibrant and engaging as the content it supports.

"With so much content to choose from, there's a growing need for recognizable sub-brands that can help to channel audiences towards the genres they want to watch," adds Bo.

"Intuitive design is more important than ever, and visual identities don't just need to stand out on their own. They need to go with everything. In that regard, we like to think of Mixible as the little black dress that will become the staple of Paramount's pop culture wardrobe."

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