Lighting up the lantern — Yango Play Ramadan 2026

I'm Head of Product, Brand & Content Design at Yango Play — leading a 20-person design org across product, brand, and content for the Yango entertainment ecosystem in MENA — streaming, music, games. Ramadan is the highest-stakes window of the entertainment year in the region — the month when every platform commits its strongest content, its biggest brand push, and its peak ad spend. We compete on two fronts simultaneously — content lineup, and brand visibility next to MBC, Shahid, and Netflix.

2025 was the first time we showed up at full campaign scale. The campaign — Cultural Takeover: Yango Play in Ramadan, MENA — took bronze at the TikTok Ad Awards in the Big Branding Event category. We were happy, and we were also not satisfied — the layout was too rigid, the logo didn't survive the move to outdoor, and consistency drifted as more titles and partners landed.

2026 was the rebuild. This case is mostly the system-level decisions I drove, with credit to the people who authored each part below.

The first thing to know about Ramadan in MENA is the lantern — the fanous. A small, glass-paneled lamp with a candle or a bulb inside it, hung in homes, carried by kids, sold in markets, propped on iftar tables. Once Ramadan starts you see them everywhere in Cairo and the Gulf — balconies, restaurants, street decorations, packaging on supermarket shelves. It's to Ramadan what a Christmas tree is to December.

The history is older than the holiday's modern look. In the Fatimid era, when the Caliph arrived in Cairo, people greeted him at night holding lanterns. After that, Egyptian kids started going out into the streets after Iftar with their own lanterns, singing, asking neighbours for gifts. From Egypt the lantern spread to the whole Arab world. By the time we got there a thousand years later, it was the one object that meant Ramadan everywhere — Cairo, the Gulf, North Africa.

In 2024, when we asked what could anchor a Ramadan brand for an entertainment app in MENA, there was only one answer.

We started small. In 2024 the lantern was barely visible — a crescent moon tucked into the logo, more of a hint than a statement. In 2025 we went all in — turned the Yango Play wordmark itself into a lantern shape, built a strong colour kickoff around it, leaned hard on brightness and contrast so the campaign would read at a glance from a moving car. That direction worked. It was the loudest brand we'd put into the region, and the one that took bronze at the TikTok Ad Awards.

For 2026 my call was to keep the lantern but redraw the system around it — same anchor, sharper engine. Doing year two right meant resisting the temptation to ship a new symbol just because it's been a year.

Year-two evolution started with three specific things we got wrong in 2025:

The 2026 rebuild had to fix all three without throwing away what people had recognised the year before.

The single biggest design-system call I made on this project. Three changes:

Everything downstream — the templates, the partner co-brand lockups, the splash screen, the app icon — is built off this redrawn lantern.

The tagline came from a single Arabic phrase. When a guest arrives at your home in Arabic-speaking culture, you say "you brought light to the place." So instead of saying "Ramadan is here on Yango Play" the generic way, we said "Ramadanak Nawwar" — your Ramadan brought light — on Yango Play.

We commissioned the Arabic calligraphy as a custom piece, then drew an English-language script in the same gradient to match — magenta running into amber, the colour of the lamp's glow.

The tagline became the anchor element we needed — the brand could appear without our logo in formats where the logo wouldn't fit, and still read unmistakably as Yango Play.

The tagline doubled as a pattern. Tiled across a deep-violet field, it became the background wash we used wherever the system needed atmosphere instead of content: behind half-screen end-frames, between hero slots in social carousels, on partner-integration washes.

The 2025 layouts had been built out of generic rounded rectangles. For 2026 I asked the team to come back with a shape that carried cultural weight — not just a frame.

The research direction I pointed at was Mediterranean and Gulf street facades. Two shapes kept repeating — an arch and a rectangle. Stack them, you get an arched window. Repeat the arched window, you get the lattice that runs through traditional Ramadan decoration. That's the form we landed on.

That became our second-act visual — the arch as both the photo frame, the content placeholder, and the structural element holding the layout together. Posters lived inside it. Cast portraits stepped out of it. The pattern wrapping the dark backgrounds came from it.

One shape, applied across roughly fifteen template types covering OOH, in-product, social, paid display, and CRM.

And just like the tagline, the arched window doubled as a pattern. Tessellated straight or tilted at a slight angle, it gave us a second background variant — used in product end-frames and OOH backgrounds where the tagline tile felt too text-heavy.

The brief here was deliberately small — don't reinvent the wheel, just move the lantern from 2D to 3D. Adding volume and a real light source turned the launch animation into a literal "lighting up the lantern" gesture across three moments — home screen, app launch, ten-foot screen.

A flat magenta-to-amber tile with the YANGO PLAY wordmark. Designed to read at a glance at thumbnail size, so it still earns a tap when it's competing with twenty other apps in a row for a second of attention.

The moment you tap the icon the flat mark unfolds — it gains volume, a real light source switches on inside, the crescent settles on top, and the wordmark eases into a 3D body. About three seconds of "lighting up the lantern" before the app appears — the same gesture the rest of the campaign builds on, just compressed.

We scaled the exact same lighting-up animation for Apple TV, framing it in a living-room context so the brand still reads when the viewer is sitting back on the couch. No reinvention for the TV form factor — the gesture survives the scale.

Tiny moment — the kind users barely notice consciously, but the kind that decides whether the brand feels alive.

The paywall and product-activation track ran under my direction across the season, designed and shipped by Anna Bugryi. Three pieces from it worth keeping in this case:

What we shipped, in numbers:

We landed at 75% of the headline subscriber KPI, not 100%. The gap wasn't a creative-quality issue — every test we ran against the 2025 baseline lifted. It was a paid-media reach problem in Egypt, where we underweighted spend relative to UAE. The system can scale further. Year three the spend mix has to catch up.

The campaign is also the design substrate for the team's 2026 TikTok Ad Awards submission. The documentary teaser at the top of this case is the submission video.

Three things, by my reading of the wash-up after Eid: