Go to YouTube TV’s website or app , and you may notice something that feels remarkably, well, non-Google: the typeface. It’s full of personality, with joyful curves that contrast against aggressive edges–the aesthetic equivalent to balloons floating next to knives. The letters are playful, sharp, and approachable–much like YouTube itself.

The font, called YouTube Sans, is very unlike Google’s normal approach to fonts, which is best described by the company’s anonymous, informational Roboto. Roboto is built to have little to no personality, to adapt to any situation, and to only convey data. YouTube Sans, on the other hand, is a new identity lurking in letterforms. And it was designed by the international branding firm Saffron to be just that.

“We didn’t want it to be too generic. You go, ‘oh, it’s just there,'” says Saffron creative director Matt Atchison, who led the project. “We wanted to create something that entered someone’s consciousness, and so bit by bit, people start to absorb this typeface and the message: ‘Ah, that’s YouTube TV talking to me!'”

For those unfamiliar with YouTube TV, the service is Google’s latest expansion into global media domination. It’s not enough for Google that people watch 3.25 billion hours of content on YouTube each month. With YouTube TV, the company wants to offer more live-streamed and traditional “cable” content, too. That means it’s competing with everyone from Comcast and DirecTV to subscription streaming services like Netflix and Hulu for the tens of billions of dollars potentially up for grabs in the market.

Google handled the interface and experience design of YouTube TV in-house. But it brought on Saffron to consider how the brand itself would be baked in. What Saffron’s designers realized early on was that they had very little to work with. YouTube TV was meant to be a Spartan media experience–the polar opposite of Netflix. Netflix had a black background with white text. YouTube TV would keep YouTube’s traditional white background with black text.

“When we were talking to the UX team [at Google], they started to give all the technical limitations, and you say, ‘Okay, right, it’s going to be a white interface with content, and beyond that, there’s very little room for expressing an identity or personality,” says Atchison. “Of course, one of the things you know will live throughout the user experience is the typeface, and the way that content is communicated. So that’s where we focused our attention.”

The question became, if YouTube TV’s font could look like anything, what should it look like? Should it be gothic like a newspaper headline? Should it be blocky like a Hollywood film marquee? The team actually found its inspiration in YouTube’s core interface element–not the logo, which users actually see relatively infrequently–but the one thing YouTube had before any of its online competitors: the play button.