01 — The Brief
No name. No identity. Vibes only.
Forum arrived with real ambition and almost no creative foundation. No confirmed name, no identity, and visuals pulled from Facebook ad hoc — borrowed, not designed. The audience was young adults, the hardest and most culturally fluent cohort to design for at Meta's scale, and the timeline was compressed.
The real tension wasn't visual, it was positional. Forum had to feel distinctly its own — a product people chose — while still reading as trustworthy and part of the Facebook family.
02 — The Decision
We could have reskinned Facebook. We didn’t.
The safe path was obvious — recycle Facebook blue, inherit its visual patterns, follow whatever the other apps were doing, chase young-adult trends. It would have shipped, and it would have been forgettable.
We anchored in Facebook blue on purpose — trust is a feature, not a hand-me-down — then built everything else bespoke: a distinct wordmark, a custom splash and motion language, an icon that belonged to Forum. To find the white space, I mapped the whole Meta and Facebook family — primary apps, feature-based companions, endorsed companions — and placed Forum deliberately inside it.
- — The Meta & Facebook app family, mapped end to end
- — Facebook blue as an anchor, not a template
- — Culturally resonant, not trend-chasing
One creative lead, one multidisciplinary team, eight brand layers built to hold together — from the App Store tile to the launch press kit. I ran the cross-functional partnership across brand and product design, content design, research and engineering, and led the creative team through app icon, iconography, motion and visual design so the system stayed coherent as it scaled.
A wordmark of its own
Forum got its own voice in type — a lowercase wordmark that reads calm and conversational, not corporate. It is the one place the brand speaks entirely for itself.
Chromatic white space
Facebook blue anchors a palette that opens into cyan, orange and magenta — colour used as generously and deliberately as the white space around it.
One motion language
Personality lives in movement. The mark flexes and settles, and the same easing carries through loading, pull-to-refresh and onboarding.
The mark, in two weeks
I directed the app icon with Koto as agency partner and ran the operation end to end — brief, reviews and delivery inside a two-week window. The result is a pair of soft speech marks — a conversation compressed to a glyph — legible in a folder full of Meta apps, and built to move.
In the wild
One system, store to inbox — the App Store listing, a Messenger invite, notification opt-in, the invitation screen, an in-app nudge and the profile all pull from the same kit.
#5
App Store chart position at launch — brand clarity drove immediate conversion
4.5★
App Store rating — the experience held up after download
Adopted
The component system and companion-app templates were picked up internally as infrastructure
The brand shipped, rated well, and kept going. The clearest sign the system worked is that it outlived its launch — the naming, the taxonomy and the templates became the starting point other teams reached for. Brand identity at that scale is organizational, not just visual.