Duolingo Halloween Icon Pack

Why Duo?

Who better fits the theme of halloween than the famously unhinged green owl who hops on every trend on social media. Duolingo has brilliant marketing, where Duo (from time to time) threatens its users to complete their lessons. Plus their brand is funny, quirky and modern.

The Aim

To surprise Duolingo users with a completely new theme for halloween. Hence, increasing user engagement on the app and on social media.

Research

Duolingo has a great website where they published their brand guidelines. I went through the whole thing and came up with some key points that I wanted to take into consideration when designing my icons.

Brand Personality: Inspiring, inclusive, can-do, curious, quirky.

Illustrations: Stylistically and practically, they need to use the fewest shapes possible. Duolingo characters and icons are designed on a flat perspective. Be as colorful as you can, they prefer unnaturally colorful characters over realism. Too many colors can hurt legibility when an object scales to a small size. (Prefer monochrome)

Duolingo's social media presence: Zaria Parvez, 24, runs Duolingo's social media accounts, specifically Tiktok. I've been a follower of their account for a while and they never seize to surprise with their unhinged content. They have a great size of social media followers and app users. That's why I think engaging with them over holiday themes would be perfect.

Engaging with users: Duolingo has done something brilliant with their app icon. If you didn't log into the app for a while, the owl in the app icon turned sick. This gathered a lot of attention.

Design of the Icons

For the design of the icons, I actually wasn't too worried about keeping the resemblance for all of them (ex. I turned the heart icon into a bat) The reason for this is because Duolingo is an app where it's average user logs in almost every day to keep their streak going. The user is already more than familiar with the app, so they likely already have all the current icons memorised by their location.

That being said, I tried to keep the general shape of the icons similar even if I changed the concept.

See my design process in this video:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ekaraoguz_taking-you-through-the-steps-of-my-halloween-activity-7257504860390969344-5Xfk?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

My Thoughts

I genuinely had a lot of fun working on this project. I am a UI/UX Designer with a Graphic Design background so this was the perfect task to combine my skills and experiment on a theme that I absolutely love. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!