eBay embraces evolution

eBay has been on a three-decade journey of evolution. What started as a simple online auction site has grown up to become an innovative global marketplace that empowers buyers and sellers in the discovery of their shared passion. We wanted our product and identity to reflect our new maturity and current customer needs, bringing an enthusiast-centric refresh of the eBay experience to the world.

An aesthetic refresh alone, without meaningful product updates, could risk diminishing trust among our customers. So we fine-tuned our product’s foundational design elements and introduced all-new, scalable components that could be extended into marketing touchpoints to unify our global brand. And so eBay Evo was born.

eBay Evo is our evolved brand and design system, created to enhance our customer experience and inspire everyday people with our brand out in the world. With evolution as the central theme guiding our path forward, eBay Evo keeps eBay in a constant state of innovation and reinvention, placing people and their passion at the core of our experience.

Fully developed in-house, eBay Evo is shaped by every team at eBay to deliver a cohesive story across our global experiences while allowing flexibility to adapt for local markets and audience relevance.

Evo is a core element of the eBay brand strategy that aims to ensure we show up with one consistent voice that resonates with our customers. It all starts with our promise to empower the largest community of enthusiasts to do more of what they love, and our commitment to deliver meaningful choice, complete confidence, and human connection in every interaction with them.

Our new creative platform Things.People.Love. brings our strategy to life in the world with one salient tagline across our marketing. It highlights the role we play in the world: that eBay is home to all kinds of things, all kinds of people, and all kinds of love. But to achieve success with our customers, we also need one consistent design framework that expresses passion, confidence, and the future of ecommerce and flows across our universe of touchpoints.

We unified under a shared vision to streamline and enhance aspects of our product, considering both designer and customer needs. We focused on simplification and modernization, incorporating updated components, patterns, and tokens for scalable use globally by both design and engineering teams.

eBay Evo allows us to continually adapt and improve our experience while enabling seamless collaboration across teams. By investing in design technology, deeply connecting design with engineering, we push the limits of front-end innovation and empower product teams to bring new ideas to life. “This integration enables us to develop real-time prototypes that enhance customer experiences and set new standards in product development,” explains Stephen Scaff, Sr. Manager, Design Technology.

The visual identity of eBay Evo is built upon evolved brand primitives that have been developed to resonate with and visually represent our enthusiast community, their passions and how they shop and discover on our site. Our design system translates into brand expressions through card stacks that reflect the eBay shopping experience. We further integrated the product into our expressions through UI elements inspired by interactions like searching, saving an item or highlighting a deal. This allows us to highlight our unique catalog, diverse community, and the discovery loop where customers explore, find unique items, or browse distinctive eBay storefronts.

Our logo and the four heritage colors, which have been integral to eBay since 1995, remain key to our identity and communications. We further evolved our palette, building a cohesive 136-color palette that directly incorporates our four colors and includes type contrast pairings that are AA-compliant, to maximize legibility.

Through imagery, we've introduced a fresh style that emphasizes storytelling, capturing our community and their passion for products in an authentic and aspirational way. Our new illustration style complements this photography in our product experience. eBay Evo's design creates a stronger brand voice through the use of bold headlines and a customized heavy weight, condensed version of our typeface, Market Sans.

To scale eBay Evo, we built a playbook to act as a central resource, showcasing all of our latest guidance to help our internal teams and agency partners effectively bring our system to life.

Created with over 50 collaborators contributing to 280 pages, the “eBay Playbook Is a beautiful, highly functional digital tool that inspires each of our diverse disciplines with tailored guidance,” says Ryan Tinsley, Staff Product Designer. Over 2,700 images and videos provide the latest and greatest examples created with eBay Evo to inspire our teams and collaborators, showcasing the best-in-class ways to bring our customers’ stories to life. The site also features interactive tools for color selection, type testing, iconography, and accessibility designed to speed up decision-making.

Our default setting is to design for everyone to engage in the eBay experience across as many touchpoints as possible. We’ve integrated accessibility into our culture and conversations as a critical piece of our product development workflow. Each component of the eBay Playbook covers design, engineering, and accessibility requirements — supporting inclusive design practices across our system.

Last year we created the Include—Accessibility Annotations Figma plug-in to enable designers to think through various accessibility requirements in their work. This tool is open to the public to allow other companies to incorporate accessibility as prominently into their design process as eBay has.

Our evolution is just getting started as we strive to place our enthusiasts at the heart of our designs and experience. eBay will continue to grow as we gather insights, develop innovative products, and cultivate a sense of delightful discovery for eBay enthusiasts around the world for another three decades and more.