A an early-stage social platform creating genuine human connection.
Role · UX/Prodcut designer
Timeline · 2 weeks
Rele needed a shared foundation for how its product should look, feel, communicate, and behave.
The challenge was balancing two needs: giving Rele a distinctive, human identity while creating a system structured enough to scale as the product and team grew. Working alongside another designer over two weeks, I helped build that foundation from scratch. Our goal was to create a system that could become a single source of truth across design, product, and engineering.
Without an established system, Rele faced a common early-stage product problem: every new design decision had the potential to become a new precedent. So the core design question became: How might we create a flexible design language that gives Rele a recognizable personality while providing designers and engineers with clear, reusable rules for building the product?
We created an interconnected Brand & Experience System and Mobile Design System that translated Rele's product vision into practical design and development standards. Rather than treating branding and UI as separate exercises, we connected the two.
Navigation, interaction patterns, and terminology were designed around recognizable conventions so users could focus on people and content rather than learning an unfamiliar interface.
Consistency builds trust
Reusable components, predictable states, and shared language help users understand what will happen before they take an action.
Explain tradeoffs and state changes so users know what success should look like.
Brand & Experience Guidelines
We established Rele’s core identity across color, typography, voice, imagery, spacing, iconography, and interaction principles
Design System
We translated the brand into a scalable UI system built around semantic tokens, consistent spacing, reusable components, and clearly defined interaction states.
Product & Engineering Handoff
We applied the system to Rele’s MVP and documented how it should translate into production.
Documented navigation/action regions creating a bridge between high-level brand strategy and implementation-level product decisions
The system was then applied across a substantial MVP framework containing 20 product journeys.
Designers gained a common language for creating new experiences. Engineers gained clearer specifications for translating those experiences into the product.