Better place for social media
BetterPlace is an AI-native social platform with a bold ambition: to make social media actually good for you. The client came with a vision already in place - a platform that uses AI to curate feeds based on personal goals and values, fostering growth, connection, and mental well-being over mindless scrolling.
My brief was to translate that vision into a brand identity and UI design. Starting from the inside out - brand values, personality, and voice - I worked through to a full visual identity: logo, colour palette, and typography that would hold up on a phone screen and a glass-fronted office building alike.
Origin story
BetterPlace is a startup building something genuinely different in a space that hasn't changed much for years: social media. Their platform is AI-native — designed from the ground up to give users control over their own feeds, goals, and digital well-being, rather than surrendering that control to engagement-hungry algorithms. They came to me with a bold vision already articulated, and an existing logo that no longer matched where the brand was heading.
The existing mark was a geometric circular symbol — a bullseye of sorts. Functional, but abstract. As the brand's vision sharpened around ideas of forward motion, personal growth, and breaking free from the noise of traditional platforms, the identity needed to catch up. The logo had to do more than identify the company — it had to tell the story.
Week 01 — Primary Research
Understanding the brand story
I opened the project with a discovery sprint — client interviews, a written brand-story audit, and a teardown of the platforms BetterPlace was positioning against. Everything I gathered clustered into five questions the identity would have to answer before a single mark was drawn.
01
Vision & mission
An AI-native platform that curates feeds around personal goals and values. The mission: detoxify social media and move people from passive consumption to active, meaningful engagement.
02
Personality & voice
Approachable, healthy, respectful. Warm but confident, grounded in empathy — and openly transparent about how the AI decides what you see.
03
Key differentiators
A growth-based ecosystem rather than an attention-driven one. Substance over sensationalism, empowerment over exploitation — summed up in the line “Let’s make social media social again.”
04
Audience insights
Deliberately broad: growth-minded adults, creators, teens and families. From anxious users looking for positivity to parents wanting somewhere safe for their kids.
05
Practical constraints
Web and app at launch, digital-only marketing. The mark had to carry the ‘B’ of BetterPlace while staying well clear of the crowded ‘BP’ territory other brands already own.
The X-Factor
Empowering users with AI-driven control over a non-toxic, growth-focused social experience that uplifts and liberates them from the chaos of traditional platforms.
Persona 01
Maya Ellison
29 · Product designer, London
What she needs
Maya has deleted and reinstalled the same three apps four times this year. She doesn’t want to leave social media — she wants it to stop working against her. She’ll happily trade reach and virality for a feed that reflects what she’s actually trying to become.
For Maya, the brand has to feel intelligent and calm, and be explicit about how curation works. Anything that reads as another engagement trap loses her inside one session.
Persona 02
Tom Whelan
43 · Teacher and parent of two
What he needs
Tom isn’t anti-technology — he’s anti-unaccountability. He’s watched his 13-year-old’s mood track the shape of her feed, and he wants a platform that publishes its standards and then actually holds to them.
He responds to warmth and transparency long before polish. The identity has to be approachable enough for a family, and serious enough that he’d trust it with one.
Defining the brand
With the research grounding the work, I mapped BetterPlace's full brand identity across five dimensions: culture, customer, voice, benefit, and value. Everything that followed in the visual design was a direct translation of these foundations into form and colour.
Branding Exercise 01
Brand attributes
Working from the research, I mapped the brand across five dimensions and generated candidate words for each. Highlighted terms are the ones that survived the client session — the words everyone agreed BetterPlace had to own.
Culture
Innovative
Empowering
Ethical
Collaborative
Progressive
Customer
Growth-minded
Diverse
Curious
Connected
Resilient
Voice
Approachable
Healthy
Respectful
Supportive
Transparent
Benefit
Control
Well-being
Growth
Connection
Clarity
Value
Agency
Integrity
Empathy
Innovation
Community
Branding Exercise 02
Defining the brand
Ten words survived the first pass — too many to design against. Grouping them by what they actually promise the user collapsed them into two ideas, and those two words became the brief for the mark.
Encouragement
A brand that feels like a hand on the back — warm, present, and on the user’s side.
Freedom
A brand that points up and out — the user setting the direction, not the algorithm.
Encouragement and Freedom framed every sketch that followed: a form that lifts, and a form that opens.
Sketching ideas
The logo exploration centred on one letter: 'B'. But it couldn't be any ordinary 'B' — it had to carry the brand's entire story in a single glyph. I explored the letterform from dozens of angles: B's with clean negative space, rounded forms communicating warmth, 3D constructions giving the illusion of an actual 'place', and configurations where the letter seemed to physically rise or step upward. A recurring concept emerged — a 'B' shaped from a chat bubble silhouette, anchoring the platform's social roots — with an embedded upward motion in its counter to signal growth and forward momentum. The word 'Better' kept pulling toward one direction: up.
Week 02 — Colour Direction
Choosing the palette
Three directions went to the client. Each was built out as a working system — mark, interface and environmental application — rather than presented as loose swatches, so the decision could be made on how each one behaved, not on how it looked on a moodboard.
Route A
Verdant Green
#12372A · #436850 · #ADBC9F · #FBFADA
The wellness default. Calm, natural and credible — and precisely what a mental-health platform is expected to look like. It said “good for you”, but it never said “different”.
Route B
Deep Purple
#28104E · #6237A0 · #9754CB · #DEACF5
Bold, intelligent, and almost absent from a social landscape dominated by blue. Purple carried the ambition without borrowing anyone else’s equity — and it held up as an app icon, on glass, and in a single colour.
Route C
Mimosa Amber
#FFE169 · #FFB433 · #FAAD00 · #E05F00
Warm, optimistic and high-energy. But amber and orange are crowded territory across entertainment and social, and the warmth read as friendly rather than challenging.
“Not too safe — more radical and bold. Challenging the status quo.”
Client direction, Week 2
That note settled it. Green was the safe reading of well-being and amber was warmth without challenge. Purple was the only route that looked like a platform arguing for a different model — so it led, with black and white behind it to keep the system versatile.
The new face
The final mark is a confident, upward-facing 'B' — its counter shaped into an ascending form that implicitly signals direction: up and forward. Drawn from bold poster letterforms and refined with the precision of a digital product icon, the logo works at every scale, from app icon to office signage.
The colour palette leads with a strong, purposeful purple — bold, intelligent, and unapologetically different from the blue-dominated world of traditional social platforms. Black and white complete the system, keeping the identity versatile and striking. Set in Poppins, friendly and modern, the wordmark reinforces what BetterPlace truly is: a platform that takes both design and its users seriously.
Let's Collaborate
I’m always excited to work on new and challenging projects. Whether you're looking to build a brand from the ground up, redesign your website, or create engaging digital experiences, I'm here to help bring your vision to life.
