Rebuilding the chess community's chess app
Founded in 2010, Lichess was built and coded by Thibault Duplessis as a side project to introduce an open source chess server to the world. The mission was simple: create a transparent chess platform for the chess community that anyone can inspect, contribute to, or improve. Fast forward to 2024, and Lichess continues to grow as one of the largest chess apps in the world with over four million active users.
As Lichess grew, it was clear that their interface and branding remained stagnant since its inception. And though the rules of chess haven't changed in the past five centuries, its global popularity has grown exponentially in the past decade in spite of the myriad of indirect competitors in the streaming age.
Newer offerings and cleaner interfaces from larger competitors like chess.com meant that Lichess needed to adapt similar strategies to cater to the growing international market. One of the key issues was that Lichess seemed to lack a distinctive identity. We felt there was no strong color identity behind its minimal palette. Nor did its logo, albeit created pro bono by a fan, convey an encompassing tone. The wordmark is functional, but it lacks any distinctive character and its sizing and weight didn't properly attach to the previous knight logo.
Our solution was to refine both the branded elements and the user interface to create a stronger identity, while retaining key functions, placements and elements that wouldn't alienate its current user base or pander to a larger audience. We knew that Lichess's market didn't comprise of newer players as the average player ELO, the universal rating system for chess player, was 1500 compared to chess.com which averaged around 800. Lichess players are the ones that study openings as a hobby, play 30-second games with steady momentum, and hustle amateurs in local parks.
The objective was to maintain its open-source and transparent ethos. We made sure that the majority of assets like fonts, imagery and iconography used for the rebrand were open-source or under creative commons licenses to match both budgetary requirements and create marketing campaigns that ensured users that Lichess wasn't "selling out."
Work completed
Product
Motion
Copywriting
Branding
Prototyping
Marketing
Illustration
Identity
Research
UI/UX
Logo
Knight and tile
Logo
We did not want to deviate away from the existing motif of the knight as a logo, as it was the most representational form of all the pieces. However, the existing knight logo felt too abstract, a bit cold, and we decided to give it more anthropomorphic features to add friendliness to a new brand.
Our team illustrated a new knight icon and applied tile backgrounds to represent both the opposing white and black.
UI Changes
Based on research, we realized that one reoccurring complaint came from player dissatisfaction of UX, claiming the app was difficult to navigate, unintuitive, and out of date.
One of the largest problems stemmed from users challenging their friends and the difficulty of displaying games.
We specifically redesigned the home screen to maintain quick times for people trying to play rapid games, as well as adding game cards to easily swipe through current games with other friends and players
Brand System
The typographic system shifted to an open source font family Inter and Inter Tight as a way to align with its open-source ethos and universal web legibility and accessibility. Budgetary restrictions and the low risk of vendor-lock in contributed to its adoption for Lichess.
A malachite green was adopted as the primary brand swatch to evoke the colors of the widely used silicone tournament chess boards.
Marketing
We realized high-concept ideas and high-budgetary ideas like professional photoshoots and illustrations would not be a proper fit for its userbase. Marketing campaigns such as this would seem too frivolous, and the pushback from users who felt that their goals were catered towards profit were too risky.
