Rele: Defining a Brand Around Everyday Connection
Brand and experience guidelines for a communityfocused social platform.
Project: Rele
Focus: Brand direction, visual consistency, voice, and accessibility
Deliverable: 32-page brand and experience guide
Stage: v0.2 working proposal
Focus: Brand direction, visual consistency, voice, and accessibility
Deliverable: 32-page brand and experience guide
Stage: v0.2 working proposal
About the project
Rele is a social platform inspired by the casual, personal sharing of early social media. Its purpose is to help people share everyday moments, discover local businesses, and build relationships around shared interests and familiar places.
The brand needed to express that purpose across different experiences, from a community invitation to a marketplace listing. This project explored how Rele could look, sound, and behave consistently while leaving room for its members’ personalities.
My role
I established the product vision and requirements that guided the brand work and directed the development of a shared reference for the team. The work built on Rele’s existing logo assets and homepage concept. My focus was clarifying how those assets should be used, how the brand should communicate, and how its values could carry into the mobile experience.
The challenge
Rele brings together social sharing, communities, creators, and local commerce. The challenge was giving those different experiences a recognizable identity without making the platform feel overly polished or impersonal.
I also wanted to capture the familiarity of early social media while supporting a readable, contemporary interface. That meant expressing nostalgia through candid moments, personal expression, and community participation.
Establishing the brand foundation
I used everyday connection as the organizing idea for the guidelines.
The guide describes four pillars: everyday expression, belonging, local possibility, and personal agency. Each pillar connects to something people should experience in the product, such as sharing an ordinary moment, finding a nearby gathering, or choosing who can see a post.
This gave the team a foundation for evaluating both visual and communication decisions.
Building on the existing identity
The guidelines preserved Rele’s existing symbol, wordmark, and “Capturing Life’s Moments” tagline.
The proposed usage rules explained when to use the horizontal lockup, standalone symbol, vertical arrangement, and community badge. They also established starting guidance for clear space, minimum sizes, background selection, and incorrect use.
The goal was to make the existing identity easier to apply consistently across app surfaces, marketing materials, and community communications.
Giving color a clear purpose
Rele’s bright teal became the main visual connection across the brand.
The guide retained that color for recognizable brand moments and proposed a deeper teal for functional elements on light backgrounds. Supporting clay, lilac, and sunlight tones introduced warmth for editorial graphics and community storytelling.
Assigning colors specific roles helped distinguish brand expression from interface meaning. A decorative accent, a primary action, and an error message needed to serve different purposes.
Defining a welcoming voice
I wanted Rele to sound like a thoughtful local host: warm, specific, and respectful of people’s choices.
The guide translated that direction into examples for invitations, posting prompts, errors, privacy messages, and payments. Discovery language could feel friendly and lightly playful, while sensitive interactions needed direct explanations.
For example, an invitation to find a nearby community supports Rele’s purpose more closely than language encouraging someone to create viral content.
Connecting accessibility to the identity
Accessibility influenced how the proposed identity could function in the app.
The guide documented foreground and background color combinations, light and dark themes, readable hierarchy, and guidance for labels and interaction states. It also identified combinations to avoid, including white functional text on the bright teal.
These decisions helped establish a visual direction that considered readability alongside recognition. They were specifications for further implementation and testing, rather than a completed accessibility audit.
Making the brand feel local
The photography direction centered on candid phone images, natural light, familiar storefronts, shared tables, and people making or doing things together.
The guide also explored community spotlights, maker stories, and event invitations. These examples connected the identity to the people and places Rele aims to support. Personal expression remained important, but practical information such as a price, audience setting, or event detail needed to stay readable.
The outcome
The project produced a 32 page working guide covering brand foundations, voice, logo usage, color, imagery, accessibility considerations, and product applications.
It provided a shared reference for reviewing the brand and discussing how it should appear across different touchpoints. Proposed messaging and visual rules remained identified as proposals so the team could distinguish existing assets from recommendations.
What I learned
This project helped me understand brand guidelines as a practical decision making tool.
A brand becomes more consistent when people understand why a color is used, how a message should sound, and what a visual choice is meant to communicate. Connecting those decisions to Rele’s purpose made the guidelines more useful than a collection of logos and swatches alone.
