At the end of every year, I put together what I have now dubbed as the “Community Engagement Cabinet Wrapped.” This is our year in review that we post in the last few weeks of December to highlight our department’s accomplishments. For the last two years, I have been recreating the Spotify Wrapped graphics from scratch while incorporating our branding.
In 2025, I meticulously watched and rewatched my Spotify Wrapped and screenshot pages that I found the most visually intriguing. From there, I began building out the design elements, (the organic line work, the dots, the spirals, and more). Once I had my design elements created, I began building out my graphics. I mimicked the slate grey and white interchangeable backgrounds so that it still had the roots of the Wrapped graphics and was easily recognizable. From there, I began layering the design elements I created, trying to faithfully capture the essence of the original designs. When I laid out my design items, I began adding my text. I distilled our yearly data down to snappy, punchy stats. This helped me fit the data easily into the Wrapped template that I was building out, but it also helped to make the content more engaging.
Additionally, when I was doing my initial research into all things Spotify Wrapped 2025, I noticed on their website that they had introduced texture to the visual identity. This was absent from the personal wrapped designs within Spotify itself. I found this peculiar because I felt that this grungy overlay provided more dimension to the graphics. To nod to this in my final design, on the first and last pages of the carousel I incorporated a grain overlay that helped to funk the graphic up a bit and provide more visual dimension. While I had considered bringing this into all the graphics, I wanted the inside graphics to still feel true to the content folks were already digesting personally.
While it can be a fun challenge to recreate easily identifiable and trendy designs, I still wanted to root this carousel in our branding. To do this, I swapped Spotify’s branded colors and fonts for ours and I traded their logos for ours. This helped to visually tie the graphics back to the City of Boston even if they were in the style of Spotify’s Wrapped visual identity.
Overall, the recreation of these graphics was a fun lesson in piecing a puzzle together and trial and error. I think the final version came out quite close to the original visual identity all while still remaining faithful to the City of Boston branding.