Celebrating a milestone: 15 years of Trading Paints

Fifteen years ago, Trading Paints started as a simple file-sharing site for iRacers. In the time since, I’ve watched the creative landscape evolve, careers blossom, and a vibrant, supportive community flourish. Together, we’ve built something much bigger than a place to share custom paints; we’ve built a platform that fuels creativity, connects artists and racers, and even opens doors for professional opportunities.

As I reflect on this milestone, I’m incredibly grateful for the people who have shaped Trading Paints into what it is today, and I’m excited for what’s yet to come.

What you’ve helped us achieve

Trading Paints first went live to the public on January 21, 2010. Fifteen years later, we serve nearly 12 million custom paints.

Each day, I’m wowed by what creators are sharing in the Showroom, which now hosts nearly 650,000 paints published by artists around the world.

You, our community of over 388,000 sim racers, have made the iRacing track an infinitely more colorful and creative place.

Beyond iRacing, I’d like to think you’ve elevated the “outdoor racing” equivalent, too — I love getting notes from designers who’ve landed real-world opportunities designing cars thanks in small part to their Trading Paints portfolios. You deserve these professional opportunities and it brings me great pride when I hear about artists earning a shot based on their sim painting experience. More and more teams and sponsors are discovering that sim-racing painters have the ultimate combination of capability and passion.

I’m inspired to witness the talent that’s on display, whether that’s from hungry up-and-comers or experienced veterans who are always happy to lead and lend their words of wisdom. While I’m proud of our numbers and metrics, watching a supportive, positive, productive community thrive is so much more important.

It’s exciting that real-world teams and artists share their official creations with the sim world, too, now totaling over 2,700 verified official paints in the Showroom. I’m grateful for the growing number of teams, sponsors, and artists who get it and lead the way in the industry: sim racers are your fans (dedicated ones!) and they’re happy to rep their favorite paints from TV in the sim world, too.

Where we’ve been

In 2010, Trading Paints launched as a simple hobby project: a manual file-sharing website where iRacers could upload their TGA files for custom paints, then browse and create customized zip files (yes, really) of their competitors’ paints with the intention of manually placing them on their computer. There was no Showroom, no Downloader, no Paint Builder — it was a different place.

But sim racing needed more, and in time we evolved to meet those needs, innovating anywhere we could.

• Trading Paints Downloader, groundbreaking for its time, became the first purpose-built third-party program for serving a racing sim’s centralized community paint library.
• The Showroom launched as the first and only place to assign a custom paint with a single click, while also becoming the platform housing countless artists’ portfolios and surfacing hosts of talented creators.
• Paint Builder launched in 2014 and evolved from an experimental concept to the go-to design software of choice for thousands of sim racers and painters of all experience levels. Paint Builder now powers 20,000 new projects every month.

These are all mainstays of the sim racing world now, but I’m humbled and grateful at how the Trading Paints community always got behind our ideas, even the things nobody asked for. You’ve continually supported us, even during growing pains and bumps in the road. We’re continuing to release new concepts, including free tools like Number Builder, and we’ve got much more planned.

Trading Paints Pro members make what we do possible, and we’ll also never forget the individual donations that helped us in the early years. Thanks to your support, we’ve been able to build Trading Paints responsibly and sustainably, based on natural growth from the passion and support of sim racers like you. I believe that shines through in everything we do.

Our team members tend to stick around for the long haul because they love what we do (and, of course, because they’re good people). Shawn Brant programmed our first bits of code in 2010 and he’s still working on new stuff and knocking out bug fixes today. Community Manager and serial social-media poster Patrick Lindsey, team member No. 3, just celebrated his eighth anniversary with us. Our team continues to grow in numbers, and I’m hopeful the work continues to challenge and inspire each of them — they’re making a better sim racing world and elevating an incredible community.

But that’s just a piece of what we’re all about, and we’ve started taking steps to better express that.

Defining our mission & values

Over the past year, we’ve taken time to define what Trading Paints stands for.

Establishing a mission statement helps us make decisions so that we’ll always be guided in the same direction. So, that’s what we’ve done — we’ve put our mission in writing. This is an important step in driving us forward and telling the world this is what Trading Paints is all about.

Our mission:

To unleash the creativity and personality of sim racers everywhere.

This means that our job is to provide sim racers all over the world with a platform to express themselves through custom paints. And we’re proud we get the privilege to do that!

Hand-in-hand with our mission, we defined our values for how we execute our mission.

Our values:

These five principles have guided us from the start, and now they’re officially documented as part of our culture.

• We’re passionate about sim racing.
  We care about what we do because we’re sim racers, too.
• We build things that are refreshingly easy to use.
  Our goal is to have a positive impact on all sim racers, regardless of age, location, or ability. We want everything we build to serve racers and artists.
• Sim racers can count on us.
  We aim to be reliable, functional, and best-in-class in every way — from our products to our interactions with people who use any aspect of Trading Paints.
• We respect the artists and their work.
  Everything we do should make designers on Trading Paints look like heroes. We’ve got the backs of creators on our platform. (And I’m hopeful that our recent launch of Instagram, as well as our Artist Spotlight blog series, are the first steps in showing that we’re serious.)
• We’re not done yet.
  We’re innovators and we’re always looking to improve the service for our members. The best is yet to come.

Every decision each of us on Team Trading Paints makes should filter through our set of values; they’re what drive us and we take them seriously. We’re proud of these values that will guide us.

A new visual identity for Trading Paints

Now for the really fun part!

To celebrate our 15th anniversary, we’re introducing some visual identity updates to better reflect who we are today.

What’s new?

While, yes, we’ve updated our logo, these visual identity updates are far more than just a logo change. We now have a more flexible and complete brand system that’s designed to support Trading Paints as we continue our mission.

Improved legibility. Over the summer, someone misread “Trading Paints” as “Trading Pants” on my business card, and that was the catalyst to finally fix our aging logo that’s served us well for nine years. The new word mark is far clearer, especially at smaller sizes, and it’s more readable at speed.

Refined logo elements. Our familiar arrow mark icon has been subtly adjusted for better harmony with the word mark, in particular its angle and softened corners.

Scalability. The new logo system adapts to different uses, from race cars to printed materials to screen interfaces. (If you’ve ever tried to put the old logo on a quarter panel of a race car, you’ve realized its shortcomings.)

New secondary marks. We’re introducing alternate logos, a badge, and a stamp design, making it easier to use our branding in more places.

Refreshed colors. We’ve replaced French Lilac with Royal Purple, a more versatile hue that’s extracted from our red-to-blue gradient, which now has a name (Velocity, ooh, so speedy). We’ve also added Dark Purple, Pure Purple, and Light Blue to the mix. You may have already started to see some of the new colors in areas like the latest Number Builder update.

You’ll see our new visual identity roll out across the extended Trading Paints cinematic universe in the coming weeks, with more changes coming to our products later this year.

Special thanks to our friend and longtime Trading Paints member Brian Folchetti for helping lead the process. It’s been a real joy to collaborate with someone who’s as excited about the brand as us, and I appreciate his patience in working with a client who probably asked for a little too much at times. (Who, me?!)

We’ve also got a new shirt in the Trading Paints Store, with more styles on the way.

You can find logo downloads and guidelines on our updated Brand page.

Looking ahead

Fifteen years ago, I never would have imagined that Trading Paints would be serving nearly 12 million custom paints to hundreds of thousands of racers in 2025 — or that we’d even be around to celebrate 15 years.

We have so much more planned that you’ll hear about in the coming months. We’re committed to building a newer, faster website and Downloader UI (yes, with much-requested dark-mode options), creating new tools for teams and brands, working on ways to promote sim photographers, adding more areas for community engagement and skill-sharpening, all while improving performance and reliability in every area possible along the way. We’re continuing to grow our blog publication (you are here) and our presence on social media to show off the great things happening on Trading Paints, whether that’s a new feature, tips and tricks, or sharing some paints that wowed us (please continue to tag us!). There’s a lot of cool projects we’re working on behind the scenes, and I can’t wait until we can share them all with you.

While there are plenty of racing sims on the market, I’d like to reiterate our support and focus on iRacing, the same we’ve had since Day One. Not only is iRacing the best and most comprehensive product of its kind, they also have an out-of-this-world team at every level — leadership, art, engineering, marketing, competition, customer service, you name it — and I’ve found no more passionate group in sim racing. iRacing’s values align with ours, and we’re grateful for how they continue to define the racing sim genre and help us do what we get to do. Plus, the iRacing community is second to none.

Lastly, I’m endlessly grateful for our talented and dedicated team. Our numbers have grown in recent years, and each person at Trading Paints continues to produce an outsized effort because they’re racers and artists, too. Thank you, Shawn, Patrick, Dustin, Aaron, Bret, Erica, Dolan, Railson, Renzo, Noshin, Ivan, Michael, Josh, and our extended network of advisors. You improve the landscape of the sim racing world every day, and your hard work and dedication continue to shape the future of Trading Paints — and the racing space as a whole.

Thanks, as always, to you — our community — for your support of Trading Paints for the past 15 years, and thank you for the continued opportunity and privilege to serve the racing world.

With love and gratitude,
Steve