Drawing inspiration from our brainstormed ideas, I developed multiple variations for each badge, presenting them to the founders for selection.
DealDog's brand strongly resonated with canine themes, thus I integrated as many playful dog references as possible in my designs.
I began by visualizing our idea, literally. On the right is our 'Mr. Worldwide' (aka Pitbull) badge, which I represented by combining Pitbull and a pitbull dog.
The more dog references, the better.
I opted for designs that enables flat color blocks and simple shapes, so they would remain clear even when scaled down on mobile screens.
But sometimes more complexity is better.
The designs also needed to be adaptable for future modifications.
In the example to the right, 'Deal Hound' is a badge that celebrates a user making 5 deals. But what if, later on, DealDog want to change 5 deals to 10, 11, or some other number of deals?
In the actual sketches, I sketched using 2 colors to separate foreground and background. This comes in very handy in the color blocking step.
Provided with a color scheme from DealDog, I developed a badge collection that drives home the qualities that they embody: bright, witty, and approachable.
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While ideating and coming up with clever puns are not my strongest suits, my team's wonderful ideas trampolined my visual creativity and allowed the badges to come out better than I can ever imagine.
Designing for small displays taught me to make illustrations that are intricate yet clear and recognizable. Using a limited color palette in the sketching phase also saved me time and allowed me to focus on effective composition instead.
These badges not only added a playfulness to the app but also boosted user interactions. Within the first month, the number of app opens from unique users increased by 60%, and overall retention increased by 34%.
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