Zenly
Bringing our worlds to life
Zenly–a social location-mapping app from the same folks behind Snapchat–is big in Japan. But they wanted to be even bigger by expanding into new markets. They asked us to translate the delight of Zenly’s product experience into a brand system that could be leveraged across marketing, activations, and digital. Together, we evolved the brand to be cohesive and expansive without losing what made it wonderfully weird.
- Design Strategy
- Visual Identity System
- Photography Art Direction
- Brand System Guidelines
We did this by creating a design strategy around the concept of “peopling your worlds.” Instead of street names and intersections on user maps, we found the best way to populate what users say was with friendly faces and characters to inject the zaniness and personality of humanity into the maps we built. We celebrated weirdness and whimsy in our 3D popsicle icons, kicked up the vibrancy of our color palette, and added quirky touches to our typography as well as our art direction.
We also dreamed up “The Zone,” a graphic device that uses the angle of the Z to showcase the spaces where maps come to life. In the Zone, friends come together, cross paths, and overlap lives on Zenly—and in the real world. The Zone activates when your paths intersected with culture, like a Lakers game or a Billie Eilish show. It also made localized activations across major Zenly cities easy and consistent (e.g. Lunar New Year in Shanghai, Dia de los Muertos for Mexico City).
Our final touch to the system was bringing the iconic Zenly popsicle to life. We turned the flat 2D graphic into a 3D symbol filled with personality, then “dipped” it in different toppings depending on the moment in culture it related to, like the “punksicle” for live rock shows.
