Our co-creation process was also the first step in leveling up the Rovio brand, giving it new life and direction. With strong design, energized messaging, and fun recruitment calls-to-action, our website and brand refresh represent a joy-first approach to the player-focused gaming company.

Rovio came to us for rapid collaborative prototyping of several concepts on brand, communication, digital products, and innovation; a corporate brand refresh that would give it the credibility appropriate for one of the world’s leading game companies. 

Established in 2003, Rovio has been making smash hit games and entertainment for over 16 years. Its Angry Birds franchise has grown into one of the biggest mobile games and entertainment brand success stories of all time.

With Reaktor, Rovio wanted to evolve and mature that company brand, to show range and take the branding beyond the Birds. Particularly important to Rovio was the enticing of new high-level senior creative tech talent in an extremely competitive job market.

Through a co-creation approach to brand definition, we worked with Rovio on a range of concepts for a more refined employer brand. From premium technology consultancy branding to more playful and warm creative studio visuals, we ultimately arrived at a solution that positions Rovio as big-league but playful, credible yet creative.

What we discovered in the exploration phase inside Rovio was a company of teams of highly skilled, passionate people, who want to spread the delight of games. It became clear to us that the essence, the brand of Rovio, is in crafting joy.

Crucial to the further refining of the Rovio brand was the redesign of its homesite. We took the brand elements that we had articulated together – the idea of crafting joy – and translated those to a playful yet premium new online experience, with Rovio’s content and people up front and center.

We kept our focus on recruitment: on building a new home for the brand that would serve talent and show both curious first-time visitors as well as potential recruits the bold innovation and culture of integrity that define the firm.

We worked with the Rovio team during COVID-19 in fully remote, socially distanced, collaborative and iterative creative sprints. By gauging their opinions and showing them various extremes, we step-by-step with Rovians got closer to our end product.

Out of that prototyping came a wealth of new features for the site and the brand: the red dot that follows the visitor throughout the digital experience, for example, as well as Rovio’s modernized tone of voice, communicating a more human, more creative, and more uncomplicated approach to their work.

The systemic modularity in the background forms a foundation that now gives greater freedom and a clearer path for content creators at Rovio to keep developing and adding in new elements to the site and the Rovio brand.

At the core of Rovio’s website redesign was the need to separate the employer brand from the company’s many individual gaming brands, both for the sake of customer experience and recruitment.

That brand renewal process for Rovio also explored a multitude of avenues for a new brand architecture, rearranging the Rovio universe with the employer brand at its core.

Rovio’s games, like its in-house teams, are defined by true craftsmanship and original characters. So as we began populating the new website with voices, we passed on the microphone to Rovians. 

From game designers to artists, data scientists to engineers, the stars of Rovio are a multi-cultural mix of uncompromising talent, sheer niceness, and a shared passion for games that make people smile. They’re the heart of the company. And now, thanks to the website refresh, they’re also at the heart of the Rovio brand.