Catch Social

Role: UX/UI Designer

Core Responsibilities: UX/UI Design | Content Design | Sticker Illustration

Overview

FrenMoji was a companion app to Ghost and a digital sticker tool that let people turn their profile-picture NFTs into stickers they could use as emojis across iMessage, Telegram, Discord, X, Messenger, Signal, and Ghost itself. It was also a bit of a teaser for Ghost, and a way to bring people into what we were building before the messenger itself launched.

I worked alongside lead designer Yasir Eryilmaz, and I pitched and led the design of the pre- and post-launch responsive landing page along with a lot of the content that surrounded it, including the sticker illustrations themselves, the app store visuals, and the UX writing across the app, the website, and our marketing materials.

The pitch: your NFT doesn't have to sit in your wallet

The argument we were making was a simple one, and we worked to keep it that way. People were buying NFTs from collections they loved, some of them fairly lucrative, and then those NFTs mostly just sat in a wallet or got used as a profile picture. The pitch was to show how emotive those same NFTs could be inside an actual conversation, across all the platforms people were already talking on, and that there was more you could do with one than hold it.

Designing the stickers

Making the sticker backgrounds for the NFTs to live on was the most fun and rewarding part of this project. What I wanted was a set of emotive, meme-ful stickers that people would actually want and reach for to convey how they were feeling, while still showing off the NFT they'd bought into. Coming up with that range of expressions and building the art around them was the part of the project I'd happily do again.

One thing that really worked out for us was how consistent NFT dimensions are. Not every NFT was going to sit well inside our sticker layouts, but we designed the style specifically around the PFP-style collections that were most popular in the space and that people were already using as their profile pictures on X and Discord. Designing for the format people had actually bought into, rather than trying to accommodate every possible piece of art, is what kept the sticker sets coherent.

Balancing the visuals on the landing page

The most difficult part of the landing page was visual balance. We were putting a lot of different art styles on screen at once, and the NFT artwork was always going to be visually loud in a way I couldn't fully control or predict, so anything I added on top of it risked turning the page into noise. I kept the backgrounds and typography very simple so the stickers could carry the visual weight, and aimed to make the copy clear and straight to the point. We tested and adjusted that copy many times through the process to make sure the message was actually landing.

What I'd do differently

If I were designing this over again, I'd really want to lean into animated sticker options and possibly GIF formats, which feels like the natural direction for a sticker set built entirely around expression. I also regret that FrenMoji never got fully integrated into Ghost the way we'd planned, since being able to use these stickers inside the messenger they were built to tease was a big part of the idea from the start.

More Info

Contact me to request more information about this project.