Mobile
Tinder Swipe Night Ending Badges
Game badges for Tinder’s interactive original series.
My Role
Illustration
Timeline
July 2019 - September 2019
Night Mode Illustration Set
Day Mode Illustration Set
Spin-off: Area 51 Badge
Area 51 Event badge is a spin off project created during the summer of 2019. The entire project took 48 hours from ideation to launch. Because of the huge amount of attention received “Storm Area 51“ event over social media, our product team made the snap decision to jump in on the hype and engage Tinder in social media conversations. Because of time sensitivity, the badge for this project is created as a continuation of the Swipe Night badge set. The experience is also created as a prequel to test out the waters with visual design direction and to give users a sneak peak into the visual experience of Swipe Night. The project received great public attention and accounted for over 200,000 adaptations by users.
Impact
Swipe Night
Traffic increased by 2 million on Tinder
26% increase in Swipes
~30% increase in matches
Swipe Night series picked up for global release
Area 51 Event
Within 7 days of launching the feature and zero paid external social media coverage, around 211,000 of users adopted the Area 51 badge to be displayed in their profiles.
Highest adopted badge within Tinder Badges
Over 50% of those users fall within ages 18-22, Tinder’s target user age
Process
Shared Digital Experience
To begin the project, our team set clear goals on creating an immersive experience which users share with each other, giving them conversation points. As an interconnected element of the Swipe Night Story, the Ending Badges tell a collective visual story with the rest of the Swipe Night Experience.
Working With a Script in Progress
With Tinder being a fast paced environment, just like any other project at Tinder, Swipe Night was also developed in a short time frame. What this means for the project was that the video content and interface design were being developed at the same time by different teams. The main challenge of designing the ending badges was the fact that actual endings of the Swipe Night Story faced many changes and were not finalized until two weeks before launch. To combat this difficulty, I connected with the lead product designer on Swipe Night during the initial stages of the project to focus on style setting and designing recurring elements before the script became finalized.
Moodboarding and Sketches
Together, the design team explored three directions for inspiration. To fit the End-of the-World theme, we explored shapes and patterns that embraced supernatural and sci-fi elements.
Crop Circles
Glyphs
Game Dashboard
Style Setting Process
Shape Building and Pattern Exploration
After sketching and creating mood boards, the next step was to build out the patterns in lo-fidelity for theme exploration.
Style and Effect Exploration
Once we moved into adding color and visual effects to the badges, we received a more finalized version of the script. This stage focused on setting the overall style for the badge set to create a visual story. I explored with gradient fills, different line widths and glows to incorporate the game-like experience of the whole project into the badges.
Defining Overall Style
After exploration, I was able to narrow down recurring elements and overall style direction and created a style guide to follow for subsequent illustrations. The image on the right shows the initial three badges that I designed based off of the endings in the initial script. Even though none of those endings ended up appear in the final version, these three badges helped tie together the overall visual direction.
Adding Recurring Elements
The recurring elements of this badge set take reference to elements from both the Swipe Night storyline and the Tinder Interface. First, recurring elements such as lasers are inspired by details with the swipe night story; Second, shapes such as hearts, stars, lighting are taken from the tinder game pad.
Final Step: Picking Through Different Ideas
Gradually over the time of my internship, the team progressed into a mature stage in both script development and and feature design. At this stage, we received a clearer direction on the overall story and what the endings would look like. Once the style was defined, it came down to interpreting the script (still not finalized) to produce the illustration that best represents the story.
For most of the endings, I came up with multiple versions based on the content provided. As a team, we made decisions on which version to pick through conversations between product and design teams, evaluating content and how one illustration fits in with the rest as a set. For some endings, it only took one try to make the ideal badge while others were more difficult to narrow down.
