Appreciate Rebranding Project

Appreciate is a social commerce platform designed to help people curate and showcase their most meaningful possessions, turning the "stuff" we own into a digital portfolio of our unique styles.

As part of the team at Appreciate, I worked to re-define what it means to marry a technology and fashion focused brand.

Appreciates brand was in dire need of a refresh. It no longer aligned with the company’s goals, ideals, or the target demographic’s aesthetic expectations. We needed something that could convey our scrappy start up foundation and immerging web3 technology, allow us to strongly position ourselves to potential investors, and speak to the fashion audience we intended to target.

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Quick Summary

My Role
Visual Designer

Problem
The Appreciate brand no longer positioned the company as a tech innovator and leader in the fashion industry.

Solution
As part of the team at Appreciate, I worked to re-imagined the visual identity, rethinking how it looked, felt, and spoke to better reflect our company’s innovation at the intersection of technology and fashion.

Contributions
• Logomark conception & refinement
• Refined color palette
• Developed illustration & pattern system
• Contributed to typeface exploration & selection

Full Breakdown

We approached the rebranding with a comprehensive design process, beginning with ideation, brainstorming, sketching, and multiple iterations, and culminating in the production of various assets for the new brand.

Ideation began with exploring symbolism, lettermarks, and how we wanted to convey Appreciate. Through this “make stuff” process we defined a the foundational aspects of the brand and who we wanted to brand towards, Brands, Fashion Owners, Fashion Items, Web3 Technology. Each element of these 4 had intersections with the others and defined further what Appreciate was and provided.

Defining Appreciate

For Owners and Items, the most important tenant was “proof of ownership.” For Brands and Web3 it was “luxury shoppers.” Each pairing brought more nuance and rational to the overall idea of appreciate and sparked the exploration of connection. Appreciate’s platform at its core was about connecting people, brands, products & technology.

With this idea in mind we started to focus and hone the visualization of Appreciate’s championing of connection. This lead to an exploration of shape mosaics utilizing letter forms and geometry. We honed this down to a few flower and weaving like marks. After we culled down the marks to a selection of stand outs, we started to explore the typography in relation to those marks.

Typography matchmaking

To fit with the tech-focused aesthetic of appreciate, we sought out a clean and modern sans serif font with a touch of character. After exploring various options, we selected Maison Neue as our typeface of choice. This versatile font works exceptionally well in the digital space and adds a unique touch to the overall brand identity.


We explored many pairings and experimented with a mix of high fashion serif fonts as well as tech focused sans serifs. Ultimately, we selected Nuezeit Grotesk for its clean and modern tech aesthetic with a touch of character and nuance to bring in our fashion industry influences. We opted to pair it with the web font Maison Neue for its strong digital readability.

Having selected our brand typeface we could move on to finalizing our new logo lockup. Using Nuezeit as the foundation we hand crafted our Appreciate wordmark to refine it towards our tech fashion identity.

Pulling it all together

We decided to move forward with the 4 cross section clover for our logo mark. This decision prompted the creation of a design tenant we dubbed The Rule of Four.

With the new logo locked in, it was time to refine our new brands color palette, iconography, illustrations and pattern designs.

Color Palette

Color palette was the first item on the list to refine. This was also the first area we applied The Rule of Four. We built out 4 vibrant primary colors, based on 4 gems, that aimed to identify the primary audience of the content being highlighted. It was important for us to be bold with these tones, making a statement as many fashion icons do.

Primary Palette


Once we identified the foundational colors we started to pair them with an accent and tie them to specific content areas. The Appreciate focused colors would be Stay Dynamic purple, and Stay Ambitious green. For content focused on owners, we paired Feeling Confident green with Feeling Joy peach. For Partners we paired Always Optimistic yellow with Always Splendid purple. Lastly we paired Be Inspired red with Be Grateful coffee to search as a utility content combination.

Extended Primary Palette


As we built out the extended palette, it became imperative for a set of colors that allowed for dynamism, as well as softer contrasting notes. Being a constantly changing industry on both fronts we hoped to serve, we wanted something that could flex and easily compliment the primary vibrant tones without taking the spotlight in the process.

Extended Accent Palette

Defining The Extended Visual Identity

With the color palette locked in, all that was left was to bring the brand to life. We developed two illustrations styles to live within the app, and the website experiences. We crafted a set of UI icons to make each of our touchpoints feel uniquely our own. Lastly we built out a pattern library to bring nuance and a luxury fashion feel to our brand experience that ties back to many iconic brands seen in the industry today.

In App & Website Illustrations

Mosaic Pattern Library

Pulling it all together

Conclusion

Through many months of hard work and hundreds of ideas that didn’t see the light of day, we finished our new Appreciate identity. It was an extremely rewarding project, that challenged me many times as a designer to push past what I thought I could accomplish and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometimes the best design work comes from being just uncomfortable enough to try something new.

Website Redesign

Appreciate is a social commerce platform designed to help people curate and showcase their most meaningful possessions, turning the "stuff" we own into a digital portfolio of our unique styles.

After the completion of the appreciate rebranding project, it was important for us to make sure that our website matched the new look and feel of the brand. We started by completely redesigning the layout of the website, taking into account our newly chosen color pairs and patterns that we had created as part of the rebranding process.

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Quick Summary

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My Role
Visual Designer

Problem
The Appreciate site experience no longer reflected the brand and provided a confusing product experience to users new and old.

Solution
As part of the team at Appreciate, we redesigned the website to align to the new company branding and bring consistency and clarity to who each page.

Contributions
• Integration of new brand styling to UI
• Creation of brand UI guidelines & governance
• Wireframing
• Component design
• Page layout design

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Full Breakdown

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The Foundational Elements

We began this process with defining how the new color palette and typeface would be used in the system.

For the color palette tokens more specifically, this involved defining the user personas the site needed to be tailored to and how they should be distinguished. The question of “how would a user be able to quickly tell if a page was for a brand partner, another user, or a specifically Appreciate branded page?” became a driving point of exploration.

   

After much deliberation, we settled on a distinct color combination for each area. Appreciate brand focused pages would be styled primarily in the hero colors of rich purple and lively green. Owner pages would have a more subtle color style, utilizing relaxing green and soft peach, as to not overpower the products in their digital collection. Partners pages would utilize vibrant purple and yellow tones to highlight our collaboration and pop against the normal site content.

Defining the structure

At the same time as the token exploration we also began to strip back the site to its foundational blocks, focusing on the content needs that would then inform how we incorporate the new brand styles.

Building the blocks

With many of the token styles and content structures defined, we started iterating on component designs. Through this work we explored how the different segment colors would flow into the components them selves, such as branded buttons or general purpose form elements.

One aspect we noticed when iterating on the overall system was that the initial yellow tone used wasn’t meeting AA accessibility requirements when used on interactive elements. We opted to darken it for these use cases limiting the original tone to graphic elements and background colors.

Being web3 based and an emerging technology, it was important to build excitement and drive home key features of the product. This led to a very graphical and photography driven experience. Visually showcasing Appreciate app in bitesized engaging bits of content helped to breakdown a complex product for any user to understand no matter the tech literacy.

Conclusion

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Through a rapid 2 months of design work, and many more in development, we deployed an enhanced site experience that met accessibility standards, brought clarity to the product offering, and positioned our brand cohesively across our digital landscape.

Appreciate
Landing Pages

We designed landing pages for various app features and business needs, in addition to the main pages on the appreciate.it website. Below are some examples of our designs.

Coverage Landing Page

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Collector’s Guide

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Press Landing Page

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Pricing Landing Page

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Feel the Difference Campaign

Jordan’s Furniture

Centered on textures, the campaign evoked warmth, comfort, and luxury, targeting adults 25-54. The key message, “Feel the Difference,” emphasized the quality and variety of materials, from rich woods and warm leathers to plush seating and cozy beds. The tone also balanced inspiration with the brand’s signature playfulness.

Credit for this project goes to the entire creative team at Jordan’s.

Lockups & Colors

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We used Jordan’s brand typeface, Mr. Eaves, for the lockups and selected elegant, seasonal colors as the primary palette to elevate the campaign’s message.

Photography & Video

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We planned to shoot 10 different room scenes for the campaign with selected merchandise, along with additional footage for TV ads and marketing assets. 

Web Pages

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The web pages were designed to reflect the campaign’s focus on textures, incorporating the illustration style, type treatment, and bold imagery to highlight the curated room scenes and merchandise.

Emails

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Emails supported the main merchandise stories for the campaign.  

Social Ads

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For social media, we followed key marketing principles—awareness, traffic, and conversion—to guide our strategy. We created tailored assets for platforms such as Meta, YouTube, and Pinterest, ensuring each piece aligned with the campaign's goals and resonated with platform-specific audiences.

Awareness


Meta Consideration

Meta Conversion



Pinterest

Display Banner Ads

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Banner ads were created in five different sizes to further promote the campaign across various online platforms.

L Bar & Game Flow

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Using different elements that aligned with the campaign’s overall cohesive visual identity, Lbar and game flows were integrated into different sports game screens. 

Rentlist

Branding
Web Design
UI/UX Design
Prototyping

Rentlist is an apartment finder website I designed during my time at Designlab. It allows users to search for apartments in specific areas and filter results based on defined criteria. I prioritized user needs throughout the design process, resulting in a visually appealing and intuitive interface for a streamlined apartment search experience.

Task Flow

This task flow outlines how a user can search for an apartment in a specific area, refine results based on criteria, view details about an apartment, and contact the owner. The entire project was focused on streamlining this process and prioritizing user needs.

Logo

I chose the name Rentlist after some research and brainstorming. For the logomark, I combined the letters R and L with an abstract shape of an apartment. I chose Lato, a modern sans serif type for the logotype, and developed a color palette later in the project.

Icons

To ensure a consistent design system, I created custom icons that complement the logomark. They feature a single color and stroke for a cohesive look.

Style Tile

I created a style guide that includes the colors, typefaces, imagery, buttons, and icons to be used. This guide serves as a reference for maintaining consistency and creating a cohesive design for the website.

Wireframes

When designing the wireframes, I focused on defining the content, structure, and layout of the core screens in the website's primary user path. Additional information for each screen is provided on the right side for a more comprehensive understanding.

High-Fidelity Desktop Mockups

Based on the refined wireframes, I designed hi-fi mockups using Figma. Below you can see the five main pages that are based on the initial task flow.

1.    Landing page

3.    Search result page

4.     Apartment page

5.     Contact page

High-Fidelity Mobile Mockups

I incorporated responsive design principles into my work by creating a mobile version of the desktop mockups. I adjusted layouts, content, and design elements to ensure optimal user experience across different devices.

Prototypes

The prototypes below allow you to experience firsthand how Rentlist's website and mobile app can be used to complete the apartment renting task.