Xsolla is the biggest name in gaming you’ve never heard of. The ‘quiet enabler’ behind many of the world’s most popular gaming experiences, it works with everyone from independent developers to major studios. Xsolla’s expanding offerings connect game makers with game players, providing much of the invisible infrastructure behind these increasingly complex experiences.

Now morevisible to players themselves, Xsolla is building technology that lets players collect, trade and purchase items across all the games they play. As the boundaries between gaming, brands and entertainment blur, Xsolla is expanding into a much broader entertainment landscape, with a vision of an ecosystem where audiences earn rewards, build collections, connect with the creators they love, and carry those experiences into the media of their choice.

Xsolla approached Pentagram to help with the next stage in its journey, and the result was a comprehensive brand system and an original fictional world that encompasses everything from B2B and B2C marketing and storytelling, to UI, sound and industrial design.

The ask
With so many different strands to the business and audiences for its technology, Xsolla needed a clear and coherent brand that could bring everything together, creating both narrative and design structures for differentiating and communicating-to the corporate and consumer audiences.

The challenge for the Pentagram team was to create a system that could be implemented consistently across a global business outputting an enormous volume of assets, while also giving Xsolla a distinctive presence that could stand out but also mesh with the visually eclectic world of gaming content.

Creating the ‘Xsolla World’
Xsolla’s scope and ambition is more than a brand. It’s already a world unto itself, and this required a more expansive, narrative-led approach.

Pentagram created the Xsolla Archive, and working with brand author Saundra Marcel expanded on this fictional, infinite space where "All the Things" exist. Occupying the liminal space between the real world and the virtual game worlds, media and the web, it houses every conceivable item, object, treasure, and reward that audiences can collect and use. Grids stacked with transparent boxes, the archive is a fascinating, never-ending, quantum space bridging the virtual and the real.

Once claimed, these objects (including the developer and publisher tools) are transferred and stored in Backpacks, which act as the users' personal inventories. Gamers are familiar with inventory systems as many games utilise them. The Xsolla brand turns this hallmark of gaming culture into an ownable brand asset. The world was built to go further than brand imagery, providing a foundation that can evolve into a fully realised virtual environment in line with Xsolla's ambitions for future products.

Meet Sol
At the heart of the Archive is Sol, a mascot created by the Pentagram team to guide users through Xsolla's platforms and experiences, helping them navigate the Archive and collect rewards across different worlds. Her simple geometric silhouette is echoed in the bespoke wordmark, but the character is fully realised, with an animated 3D model and a comprehensive behaviour set.

Along with The Xsolla Archive, Sol was brought to life through sound design by Obelisk music. Subtle tactile and textural clips layer to give depth to the industrial Archive environment, contrasted with Sol's tonal, melodic personality. The modular sound architecture can be reconfigured to score new assets as the brand grows.

Labelling the Archive
Any archive is only as good as its cataloguing system. With Xsolla operating at a vast scale and dealing with billions of virtual items, the challenge was to ensure that the Archive could successfully keep track of everything.

To solve this, Pentagram created a bespoke labelling architecture. Categorising every unique item and iconographically communicating their taxonomy, these labels are a visual motif that creates a consistent, attributable identity across everything from physical products and narrative imagery to the user interfaces customers interact with every day. In game worlds, the labels are seen on the objects themselves, marking them as collectable and instantly identifying everything as originating from Xsolla.

A label tool built with Variable includes an API that pulls labels in real time into web and mobile applications, and generates static assets for marketing and storytelling. Every item shown in any of Xsolla's brand visuals is searchable via its unique label ID. The movement of items through the Archive, packed, labelled and transferred, inspired a series of highlight animations used at key interaction moments to celebrate the acquisition of new items, adaptable to many fidelities of interaction.

Building the identity system
Pentagram designed the identity system to work across every part of the Xsolla ecosystem, from developer tools and user interfaces to marketing, merchandise and live events.

A number of core design principles are applied consistently throughout, creating a recognisable visual language that scales across the business and clearly identifies application rules for talking to either a B2B or B2C audience.

Colour is used to distinguish Xsolla's two primary audiences. Business customers are mostly concerned with the production and management of items within the Archive, so the light-mode palette reflects its bright, futuristic industrial environment. Gamers spend most of their time in game worlds, and the dark-mode palette provides an immersive, cinematic backdrop for those experiences.

General Type Studio's Pilat runs throughout: a square grotesque with the industrial character and flexibility to cover functional interfaces, long form information and bold display typography, with specific weight and width styles contrasting the two audiences.

The geometric design language of Sol and the brand logo extends into the icon system, with icons derived from Sol's distinctive silhouette. Bold and adaptable, they work across every level of detail, from two-dimensional graphics and three-dimensional objects to the functional icons in Xsolla's interfaces. Initially designed to organise the Archive, the functional labels also act as an important graphic device, their modularity scaling into more expressive graphic containers for bolder layout design. The same modular logic extends across the broader layout system, working equally well for Xsolla’s own content and the third-party games and entertainment brands featured across its platforms. The Pentagram team worked with Daniel Kozma and POV studio to develop the UI architecture, design system and implementation guidance for Xsolla's web, product and app design.

Pentagram also developed an industrial design language alongside Sol's character design, extending this visual coherence into the objects Xsolla makes itself, from digital currencies, collectables and promotional rewards to the hardware and equipment that keeps the Archive running. Future-tech aesthetics combine with functional industrial rationalism to create an object language that is grounded and understandable, while still suggesting the futuristic world Xsolla is building. The same language carries through into Xsolla's merchandise, exhibition installations and products.

A world without limits
Like the Archive itself, the identity Pentagram has created for Xsolla is designed to grow over time, combining practical tools with a distinctive visual language as Xsolla expands across an increasingly diverse entertainment landscape. Xsolla built the place where all the things live, and the new identity is how everyone finds them.