Here's how one of my younger sister's nicknames sparked inspiration for the entire Jelly Tutor brand.
Alex BB.
Founder, Visual Binary
Context
Jelly Tutor is a mobile app containing AI tutoring games, designed to help kids aged 5-11 with their Maths, English, Reasoning & more.
This is the story of why we called the app 'Jelly' and how that sparked an entire brand design, which included 120 3D icons (back in 2021, before AI diffusion models were capable!).
If you want to learn more about the story, and key takeaways, from working on Jelly Tutor, you can check out this other article.
What call it Jelly?
After we had identified the problem we wanted to tackle whilst building Jelly, we realised we needed a brand identity that appealed to both kids (within a fairly wide age range) and their adults.
We wanted a friendly and welcoming name, not just a sterile utilitarian name like 'MyAITutor'. We also wanted a name that transcended any given feature: we hoped the app could expand well beyond its initial focus of Maths games, and become an all-in-one learning tool.
It was when I was visiting back home that the idea for the name came…
One of my younger siblings is called Angelica. We call her Jelly for short (derived from 'An-jelly-ca'). As soon as I called her nickname that day, the concept for Jelly's name went off like a lightbulb.
Then the idea grew. Having an app mascot (like Duolingo, a major initial inspiration for the Jelly app) felt like a perfect fit for the app.
That was where the ideas for the Jelly brand, and accompanying designs, were born.
One of the Jelly avatars
The process
After that initial spark, the entire process to develop the final brand - and all 120 3D icons - took less than 10 days.
I started with the logotype, knowing that the typeface was going to be a major reference for the rest of the brand. After 20 minutes exploring the Adobe Fonts web tool, I had found the ideal font family.
Now we needed a colour palette. Luckily, that was informed by the concept of the app's mascot. I wanted there to be a 3D avatar of jelly; a picture-perfect resemblance of the food we had eaten tonnes of when we were kids. At least in my mind, the typical colour for jelly was red and purple. After exploring a few variations for a total of an hour, I had the basic palette sorted.
Then the final task was designing the 3D Jelly avatar. I didn't start out intending for there to be so many unique variations of the character. But pretty quickly, whilst designing the initial one, the concept for kids to be able to customise their avatar - for points they earned for learning inside the Jelly app - started to develop. That led me to think through how to create a customisable and extensible base icon; a 'basic' Jelly avatar, which can change its appearance and put on 'costumes'.
All icons were designed inside Adobe Photoshop, with a base model that allowed for easy alteration and customisation to create over 100 unique characters.
The results
The font family of Jelly is Varela Round.
The 120 unique Jelly 3D avatars were designed in Adobe Photoshop.
The Jelly app icon was rendered in Figma.
The final Jelly App Store icon
Example of the Jelly logotype and avatars
Fin.