Branding & Identity · Animal-adoption app · Germany

Balu: a dog who helps you find a dog

Balu is a German app that connects animal shelters with people who want to adopt a pet.

The task. The developers came with a loose brief: colours, an app icon and a logo in bold, rounded, friendly lettering. They felt the brand should include a dog, but didn’t know whether it would be a logo, a symbol
or a mascot — and the app didn’t have a name yet.

My idea. Give the dog a name, and let that name become the name of the app. The dog turns into a mascot
— the user’s main helper in finding a pet. The team chose Balu, and I drew him.

What I did

— Proposed naming the app after its mascot

— Hand-drawn wordmark: heavy, soft letters with rounded ends, built on a grid so every stroke and gap has the same thickness

— Colour system and app icon

— Mascot Balu and a series of scenes with him: search, welcome pages, newsletters, error screens

— Pattern of real rescued dogs

— Loading animation with two real dogs

— Onboarding and UI illustrations

Instead of a loading circle, the app shows two real dogs, Bruno and Semyon. Bruno was rescued from the street
at ten months old. In his new family he met Semyon, an Irish setter, and they became inseparable.

For the key moments in the app — newsletters, technical problems, digests — I drew Balu in different situations, so the set can keep growing.

The pattern is made of many different dogs. Every one of them is real, and each has its own true story.