INDEXHere*
2023 – Present
Here* — a platform that enables people to intentionally reflect, connect and share their experiences through a list of their favorite spots.
Role
Chief Design Officer
(See more)
SkillsBrand design
Product design
Motion design
Design systems
Social media marketing
Overview
Here* is a platform to explore, save and share your favorite spots in any city. It allows you to create shareable city playlists and explore whithin your community. Our founder Juliette was seeking a lead that can oversee the brand & product and help bring Here* to life.
The goalHelp refine the company's mission and develop a robust brand that seamlessly integrates across the landing page, app, and all marketing materials. Using the brand language, create screens and extensive flows that cover critical user journeys — while building systems and flows flexible enough to let the team grow and the product expand. Partner closely with engineers to rebuild both the marketing website and the product from the ground up.
Building the brand
The inspiration
Exploring both organic and structured approaches, I sourced inspiration and proposed strategic directions for the brand's evolution.
Ultimately, we met in the middle, drawing our primary inspiration from DJ and event posters known for their experimental, community-focused designs with layered imagery and striking typography.
We wanted our brand to be a friendly, energetic, trustworthy
Some other key words I kept in mind while creating the brand were; welcoming, community, lively, personalized, friendly, underground, organic, breaking the grid, layered, complex, reminiscence, youthful
Logomark
The asterisk is a huge part of the brand. It represents our product elegantly since the main goal of Here* is to reference your favorite spots and share with friends why you like them. We created a shape that would also mimic a highlighter stroke.
LogoIn order to complement the new asterisk, we adjusted a few letters to match the slant of the shape. We also decided to keep the logo lowercase for a more casual, friendly logo.
Typography
We used a mix of two grotesque fonts, varying in versatility. Golos is used throughout the product and PP Radio Grotesk mainly used as a display font. Then introduced an old style serif, Crimson Text, to bring a hint of nostalgia and history. Crimson is only used for city names and editorially.Color palette
Our brand color, neon yellow is modern, bold, energetic and gets inspiration from highlighting meaningful information. Our secondary brand color, blue grounds our brand and makes it reliable & trustworthy.
Expanding the brand
Using the the brand, I then designed our marketing website, social media posts and videos, and more.
Stickers became a big part of our brand as it brings a human touch and give the essence of collecting and making memories which is really big for traveler and explorers. The stickers aren’t only for decoration, some also have functionalities. eg. guidance arrow, location pin, numbers, buttons
Building the product
Most recently, I’ve been working on our soft launch, building components and systems and scaling them to our primary UX flows, and finally, working with our engineers to build our soft launch.
Impact
As a co-founder, and lead designer in a team of three, I touched every part of the creation and launch of this product.
From an ever evolving brand, design systems, and motion to marketing strategy, asset production, and product design – I have helped bring this product from 0 to 1 and beyond
• Gave the brand direction, created visual elements and guidelines to use as we grow and build our product
• Strategized for social media and marketing and created social assets, motion reels and templates to be re-used
• Built out design systems and components that sped up the process of building the app
• Designed and strategized our full demo and worked with our engineers to soft launch a fully functioning product.
Here* website