Swipely

← All projects

Swipely is all about discovering new places, earning rewards and having fun. As visitors to the site get more involved, their enthusiasm increases when they’re awarded virtual gifts. A frequent flyer? Here’s a plane. Like to hang out in bars? Here, have a fancy cocktail and a bottle of beer. But people wouldn’t vie for the virtual gifts if they didn’t look really gorgeous. It was the importance of this gorgeous-factor that prompted the site’s creators to contact us.

Metaphors and style

We decided to go with metaphors familiar to all Americans. This was essential because the site audience is almost entirely from the U.S..

Swipely cofounder Angus Davis helped us to shape ideas and their renderings so that they’d be readily recognizable to Americans.

For the Swipely icon set, we developed a genuinely unique style, though at the same time it isn’t revolutionary. The result is an exciting mix of photorealism and cartoonish look, simultaneously serious and humorous.

The Process

Swipely required icons in three size variations: 32 × 32, 64 × 64 and 256 × 256 pixels. We started out by crafting small icons to define the basic shapes, colors and finishings. It’s these small icons that play an awfully important part because users deal mostly with them on the site.