Brand identity for
a social aggregator

Mima is a social aggregator that pulls your friends' posts, chats, and updates from every existing network into one unified view, with no new platform to join and no migration required. The branding constraint were unusually demanding, as the identity had to resonate with a 16-year-old user while also earning trust from parents, investors, and tech press. So this dual register meant being teen-voiced first and adult-readable second, punchy without being disposable.

The app sits underneath existing networks rather than competing as a new one, we came up with the tagline "Where your people are" to anchor every decision that followed. Every brand output (the logo, the palette, the voice) had to satisfy that dual register of credibility with teens and to a boardroom. It needed to be personal without being frivolous, distinct without fighting the platforms it lives alongside.

After 400+ iterations across three directional phases, the solution converged on a single continuous stroke, a loop that reads as connection across a gap (which is exactly what the product does). The geometric and letterform directions were discarded because they were too similar to standard app icons or read as another social network, neither of which suited a product that lives underneath platforms rather than as one.

The final mark can be drawn in one motion, animated along its own path, and holds up at any scale from 16px to billboard, properties that came from 140+ refinement passes on stroke weight, curve tension, endpoint radius, and cap behaviour. The stroke itself took about four seconds, a sketch gesture near the end of the first few days. Making those four seconds survive at 16px took the other 140 passes.

We developed 22 complete colour systems, each with its own logic, emotional register, and full 11-step token scale from 50 to 950, before shortlisting four finalists. Every network Mima aggregates has already staked a strong colour claim, so the palette could not compete; it had to coexist. The same discipline as the 401 logo explorations applied here: volume first, judgement second. The palettes ended up named after food (Ube, Matcha, Just Orange) because naming them after feelings had produced arguments in the studio, and naming them after food produced consensus.

60% of the panel independently selected the Ube (lavender) palette, not the safest choice, and not the conventional tech-startup direction, but the one that felt most personal to them. The four finalists had been presented to a representative panel mirroring the brief's dual audience of teens and adults, using identical mock interfaces with no leading framing. The vote gave the client a user-validated data point for investor conversations, and confirmed that the audience wants to feel seen, not merely served.

The brand system was built on the same principle as the product itself: nothing is locked in. It is the mark's promise, connection without possession, applied to the engineering. Tokens replace hardcoded values, a theme-switchable CSS architecture lets any engineer extend the system without touching design files, and the styleguide lives in a browser rather than a paid Figma seat, so the whole team can reach it.

The deliverables include the mark and wordmark family, 11-step colour scales, a full type scale, spacing and radius tokens, a component library, and a linked Ube styleguide: 4,000+ lines of code on the main branch, with considerably more across exploration branches, discarded palettes, animation curves, and layout approaches.

The system was built with Cursor and Claude Code. AI tooling is what made a living, browser-native Component Kit achievable inside a 26-day engagement, but the decisions that give the system its shape, the naming conventions, the 11-step scale structure, the semantic alias exposure, were design-led.

Each phase of work was tested against the same dual audience, teens and the adults who fund, build, and report on the product. The brand does not rely on them liking different things. It relies on one set of decisions that works for both.

The user vote validated the palette, the mark passes every size and context test we could design, and the token architecture makes the system maintainable by any engineer without a Figma seat. "Where your people are" is the product premise in four words, and the Component Kit carries the same implication: Mima holds nothing of yours that isn't already yours.