Jul 13, 2024
The Design School
A refreshed identity system for The Design School, focused on student-facing visual language.
Program
My Role
Identity Systems & Visual Strategy
Duration
3 months
Team
2 Product Designers, 2 Engineers, 2 Storytellers (Cross-functional)
Overview
"How might Snapchat encourage wellbeing through existing features and playful tone?”
ChallEnge
Courto’s early app experience lacked structure: score tracking was unreliable, booking courts was clunky, and community features felt underdeveloped.
Players struggled to keep all their tennis activities in one place. The brand needed a unified, modern platform to support both casual and competitive athletes.
Early Exploration
Mapping stigma, visibility, and belonging
We began with open-ended brainstorming and need-finding to explore where Snapchat could meaningfully support Gen Z's mental health.
Three early themes emerged:
Reducing stigma around mental health expression
Creating safer ways to seek and offer support
Fostering a sense of belonging and connection
From these themes, we drafted multiple “How might we” statements, exploring visibility of emotional states to encouraging earlier help-seeking behaviors.
However, not all directions felt appropriate or safe within a social platform, which led us to iterate quickly and critically.
Brainstorming
Concept Iterations
Why early ideas didn’t fully work
Wellness Reminderes
Our first concept explored embedding wellness reminders directly into Snapchat, encouraging users to drink water, stretch, or take breaks.
While helpful in theory, this approach felt:
one-sided and individual
lacking social accountability
disconnected from Snapchat’s playful, relational core
We then explored a concept focused on connection, where profiles became “homes” friends could visit to check moods, leave notes and see time zones.
While this created warmth and community, feedback revealed serious concerns:
emotional labor shifted onto friends
vulnerability could become performative or “cringe”
potential ethical risks if distress went unnoticed
Chillah Cribz
targeting the root Problem
'College students often neglect their needs, not realizing the impact on their mental and physical health.'
This led us to reframing our problem statement.
Rather than asking users to explicitly open up, we aimed to encourage small, everyday acts of self-care and healthy habits.
Design decision
Choosing play and shared accountability over explicit wellness features
"What if taking care of a pet also meant taking care of yourself?"
Research from Purdue University’s Psychological Sciences department (2025) shows that seeing and interacting with animals, even digitally, can positively affect mood.
Since Snapchat already supported a pet system, we saw an opportunity to build on an existing interaction model rather than introduce an entirely new behavior.
Solution & Concept Direction
How it works
Habit Pets allows users to co-parent a virtual pet by completing shared goals together, reframing self-care as connection and mutual accountability.
Friends with a streak can adopt a pet together
They choose goals such as staying active etc.
Goals are broken into playful missions (e.g., walking your pet)
Missions can be completed together or individually
As missions are completed, the pet grows and levels up
Mid Fidelity
Defining flow and hierarchy
We focused on structure and the user flow, mapping how Habit Pets integrates into Snapchat and how users move through adoption, goal selection, and progress.
Key decisions explored:
Leveraging Chat and Profile as high-visibility entry points
Framing goal selection as a gamified social interaction
Designing clear feedback loops to reinforce pet growth and progress
High-fidelity
Translating the idea into Snapchat’s visual language
We refined Habit Pets to feel seamless in Snapchat, emphasizing the 2-player connection and playfulness.
Design considerations:
Snapchat typography and color system
Soft hierarchy and generous spacing
Playful visuals while avoiding over-gamification
Open Figma Prototype
More about me
Business impact
Gateway to Snapchat+
Habit Pets drives value for both users and Snapchat by encouraging longer-term engagement rooted in meaningful interactions in the app.
Impact areas:
Increased time spent in Chat and Profile
Stronger and more meaningful connections between users
Monetization through Snapchat+ (unlock pet customization and fun interactions)
Post-Academy Iteration
Designing beyond the program
Before
After
Before
After
After Snap Academies, I revisited Habit Pets with a stronger grasp of layout systems, spacing and visual hierarchy, refining the UI toward production readiness.
What improved:
Clarified typographic hierarchy to guide attention and reduce cognitive load.
Standardized spacing and padding for stronger visual rhythm and consistency.
Simplified copy and removed visual noise to keep focus on core actions.
Reflection
Designing care through connection
Through Snap Academies, I learned how to design within real product constraints:
balancing user wellbeing, platform tone, and business goals while collaborating closely with engineers, storytellers, and nonprofit advisors. Iterating on this project after the program allowed me to revisit my decisions with a stronger understanding of layout systems, hierarchy, and production-ready design.
This experience shaped how I approach product design today, grounding ideas in research, refining them through feedback, and continuously improving my work beyond the original brief.
