Cross-team brand refresh
Rebuilding the app icon, the core app experience, and the design system behind it — to fix a brand that had fallen behind the competition it was losing customers to.
Our brand was losing to prettier competitors.
Conversion had started slipping, and it wasn't a pricing or product problem — it was a perception one. Sitting side by side with the apps our customers used every day (Target, Amazon, Instagram, Nordstrom), Chatbooks looked dated. Everything in the product was the same blue, with no visual hierarchy telling people where to look or what to do next.
The app icon reinforced the problem before anyone even opened the app: it didn't match the product inside it, and it didn't hold its own on a home screen next to brands that had invested in their visual identity.
I owned it end to end.
The app icon, the full screen-by-screen refresh, and Breakfast — the design system we built underneath all of it — were all mine to drive. I worked in constant lockstep with our brand director in marketing so the product and the brand moved as one, rather than as two separate rebrands that happened to ship in the same quarter.
That meant making the final call on the design direction, but doing it in a genuinely mixed room — design, brand, product, and engineering all shaping the outcome together. It's one of my favorite examples of what happens when teams talk to each other more than usual.
Let the user's photos carry the color.
The insight that unlocked the direction: Chatbooks' product is other people's photos. If the chrome around those photos is loud, it competes with the thing people actually came to look at. So the big idea — "Balanced Breakfast" — was to pull color out of the UI itself and let it come from three places instead: the user's own photos, our branding, and marketing moments. That meant the core app needed to go quiet: minimal color in UI elements, monochromatic by default, hierarchy built with contrast and space instead of five different blues.
Presenting real options, and making the call.
Because the icon is the first brand impression on someone's home screen, I took this one to the executive team as a formal decision rather than a design footnote. We explored dozens of directions — different colorways, gradients, and mark treatments — before narrowing to three real contenders and a packaging system to match.
We landed on the multi-color book-and-chat mark: distinct enough to stand out on a crowded home screen, flexible enough to work across every packaging and marketing surface, and true to a brand that describes itself as colorful rather than monochrome everywhere else.
We didn't just believe it — we tested it.
Every design in the refresh went through our standard A/B testing process before it shipped broadly. On top of that, we ran a dedicated usability study with five participants to pressure-test our core assumption — that a calmer, photo-forward interface would actually read as clearer, not just quieter — before committing to the full rollout. Participants consistently found the new hierarchy easier to navigate than the old all-blue version.
A brand moment that broke through.
Shortly after the refresh launched, we put out a hero ad built on the new brand system — and it went viral, giving Chatbooks a level of visibility it hadn't had before. The clearest proof, though, was quieter: an app and a brand that finally felt like one coherent thing, instead of a product team and a marketing team pulling in different directions.
The real win was how we worked together.
This was a genuinely mixed effort — design, brand, product, and engineering all in the room, shaping the same outcome instead of handing work down a line. I loved collaborating across departments on this one, and it reinforced something I still believe: most of what goes wrong on a cross-functional project comes down to teams simply not talking to each other enough. When we did, the work got better, and it was a lot more fun to make.