Freepik becomes Magnific with a transformation designed by AREA 17

The Brand Identity: Freepik spent more than a decade building one of the largest libraries of stock visual content on the web, growing into an AI platform spanning image, video, 3D and audio with a million paid subscribers behind it. But the name had stopped describing what the company had become.

Paris and New York-based brand and digital product agency AREA 17 took on the rebrand to Magnific, placing that reinvention at the centre of the brand idea. “Creating the Magnific brand wasn’t just about differentiating them in the space, it was about revealing their own transformation story – from Freepik to Magnific,” Thomas Squire, Creative Director at AREA 17, tells us. “This narrative of transformation acts to inspire creatives who are navigating their own moment of reinvention as AI reshapes how all of us work.” Chief Experience Officer Martin LeBlanc came to AREA 17 with a company that had already changed.

It had spent three years rebuilding its product around generative AI, its paid user base had crossed a million subscribers, and AI revenue had tripled year over year. Most of the outside world, however, still saw a stock image platform. The brief was to close that gap and make the change feel like a natural progression rather than a reactive reinvention chasing the AI moment.

Strategy Director Jassica Bouvier frames the opportunity as a chance to “flip the fear-based narrative that says that AI is replacing creativity with a rallying cry: dare to rewrite the old rules and reach new creative heights.” The transformation already existed within the company; the rebrand aims to make it visible. The relaunch as Magnific had to bring a community Freepik had served for over 20 years along with it and cater to the new ‘pro’ audience Magnific is targeting. Through research, AREA 17 found the two groups were actually closer together than they first appeared.

“They are both professional creatives who want to push the boundaries of their work,” Bouvier explains. “The most important thing was to build a brand that could comfortably speak to both the individual creative and the enterprise decision maker – flexing to be more playful and more serious depending on the context.” For LeBlanc, this settled how to carry existing customers across. Magnific simply continues the mission that Freepik began. The connection between Magnific and ‘being magnificent’ became the project’s north star. “Every visual and verbal decision we made tried to express what it means to be magnificent,” Squire tells us.

The clearest expression of that is the ‘Monumental M’ logomark, which “draws on the idea of monuments past and present – structures that captivate us, stand the test of time, and provoke new thinking,” he reveals. The studio looked to testaments to human creativity that have outlasted their makers, from the pyramids to Stonehenge, reaching for the creative drive that endures whatever technology arrives next. From the same root came the ‘Be Magnific’ tagline, an instruction to do the best work of your life rather than add to a feed of disposable content. The hero colour, Magnific Magenta, aims to pitch against conventions in the AI category.

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The rebranding of Freepik to Magnific represents a significant shift in strategy for a well-known platform, making it impactful and relevant for brand strategy professionals, while the concept of transitioning to an AI-driven resource is becoming more common in the industry.