Phoenix Rising: New Branding & Smart Exclusions

Day two of Flutter development brought something special: MovieQuest found its visual identity.

The Phoenix Rises

A good logo tells your story instantly. The old phoenix was nice, but it didn't scream "movies". We needed something better.

Enter the phoenix filmreel logo.

The phoenix now clutches a filmstrip in its talons, the turquoise reels glowing against orange and blue feathers. It's unmistakably MovieQuest - rebirth meets cinema. The logo works everywhere:

• App icons across Android, iOS, and web (40+ sizes generated automatically)
• Home screen with dual gold/turquoise glow effect
• Favicons that actually look good in browser tabs
• PWA icons with proper safe zones for maskable designs

We added two new accent colors to the theme:

• accentTurquoise (#4FD1C5) from the filmreel
• accentGreen (#68D391) from the phoenix's wing accents

The branding now feels cohesive. Professional. Ready for launch.

Not That Genre

Here's a problem: you want action movies, but NOT superhero films. Or horror, but NOT gore. The old system? All or nothing.

New system: three-state genre filtering.

Tap a genre chip once: yellow with checkmark - include this genre Tap it again: red with strikethrough - exclude this genre Tap a third time: gray - don't care either way

Each state has haptic feedback and a subtle scale animation. It feels tactile, responsive, satisfying.

Behind the scenes:

• Included genres use TMDB's with_genres parameter
• Excluded genres use without_genres (completely filters them out)
• The ALLE/ÉÉN toggle only affects included genres
• Excluded genres are ALWAYS filtered regardless of match mode

So if you exclude Horror but include Action + Comedy with "ÉÉN" mode, you'll get action movies OR comedies, but never horror. The math works exactly how you'd expect.

And it's backward compatible - the database stores excluded_genres as an optional field, so old sessions still work fine.

Going Live

While we were at it, we deployed MovieQuest to Vercel for web access.

Same Flutter codebase. Same Supabase backend. Now accessible from desktop browsers.

The build pipeline:

1. Generate web-specific environment config from Vercel env vars
2. Build Flutter web with release optimizations
3. Deploy to movie-quests.vercel.app
4. Auto-deploy on every push to main branch

We hit some snags (256-character command limits, asset requirements, font warnings), but eventually got it running smooth. The web version is now live and tracking analytics.

Three Wins

In one day we:

1. Established visual identity with a logo that actually represents what we do
2. Doubled filtering power with genre exclusions (not just inclusions)
3. Went multi-platform with web deployment alongside mobile

The phoenix is rising. And it's holding a filmstrip.

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This is part of the MovieQuest development series. Previous: Flutter Day One: Three Game-Changers