Instead of using generic categories or flat UI icons, each experience was turned into a collectable stamp system inspired by vintage postage marks, travel memorabilia, and old-world ephemera.
The stamp format was chosen deliberately. Stamps historically represent movement, journeys, discovery, and collecting, ideas deeply connected to how people experience cities, friendships, and spontaneous plans. The rough textures and imperfect cut edges helped the product feel human and tactile rather than overly polished or corporate.
Meanwhile, assigning every category its own distinct visual identity improved recognition across the product while still maintaining consistency within the larger ecosystem. This system eventually became the visual backbone of the product, appearing across onboarding, invites, hotspots, app previews, social content, and in-product storytelling.
Reimagining
Classical Paintings
Into Hotspots
The hotspot banners were designed to feel cinematic instead of transactional. Classical paintings became the starting point because they already carried emotion, celebration, intimacy, movement, and chaos, the same emotions tied to social gatherings.
Instead of simply referencing them, the paintings were manually rebuilt and reimagined in Photoshop to fit modern experiences. The contrast between historical paintings and modern social culture created visual tension that felt humorous, dramatic, and memorable while helping ordinary plans feel larger than they actually were.
Every composition was manually collaged, extended, retouched, and
art-directed before AI-assisted workflows became common.
Designing Discovery
Before Download
The App Store and Play Store previews were approached more like campaign posters than product walkthroughs. Instead of focusing only on features, the screens were designed to communicate mood, participation, spontaneity, and social identity before users even entered the product.
Layered editorial compositions, cinematic photography, floating interface elements, scrapbook-inspired layouts, and tactile textures helped create previews that felt socially alive rather than purely functional.
The objective was to make the product feel like a social atmosphere people wanted to belong to, not just another app to install.
Building The
Cutout World
As the visual language evolved, cutout imagery slowly became one of the strongest recurring motifs across the product. Inspired by scrapbooks, DIY posters, zines, internet collage culture, and printed textures, the system intentionally embraced rough edges, grain, halftones, grayscale imagery, and imperfect compositions.
Cats, arcade machines, traffic cones, speakers, and random objects became part of an expanding visual library that gave the product unpredictability and personality.
The imperfections themselves became important because they made the interface feel more human, playful, and socially alive instead of overly optimized and sterile.
