Anuar Zhumaev

UULA · Branding & visual language · 2022

A new visual language for UULA

UULA is an educational app for 12–18 year olds, used alongside school. It wasn’t appealing to its full potential audience: its look felt dated, and its design system was cluttered and near the end of its life. As design lead, I explored new directions for the brand and the app’s visual language.

Client
UULA
Role
Design lead: branding, UI/UX, illustration art direction, concepts
Year
2022
Status
Exploratory work

How

Research the market, write a thesis we could test, turn it into several visual concepts, test them with users, and develop the winner.

Cartoon, first in the user tests

An animal world that includes people. Bright, friendly colours, forms and illustrations compete for a young audience’s attention and work for all genders. The student is the protagonist: they go to school every day, but their problems belong to this world, not the real one. It’s an escapist world, with more encouragement and less pressure.

The screens follow the app’s existing flows.

Cartoon concept screens: subject tiles with a cat avatar, a biology lesson with two cats talking, a 78-day streak, and a perfect-score screen with a tiger
Cartoon concept: a fox teacher posing a quiz question, an astronomy video lesson, and a board of illustrated characters and scenes

Clean, second in the user tests

A streamlined, clearer version of the existing app, with simplicity as its point. Users responded strongly to it, and it stayed a candidate for further development.

Clean concept screens: a computer science course with a 3D computer, university subjects as 3D objects, recent lessons, and a video player

For its gamification screens and intermissions, I assembled a reference library of 3D assets.

3D assets: colourful subject cards, a trophy unlocked as a floating 3D cube, and a board of sleek white 3D objects