The Challenge
Zenly's brand existed almost entirely in 3D — beautiful, immersive, and slow to produce. Every creative took days to render. As the app entered its fastest growth period, the marketing team needed a graphic design identity that could move at the speed of social: reactive, high-volume, ready to deploy. The brand also needed to grow up — without losing the personality that had made it one of the most beloved social apps in Europe and Asia.
The Objective
Lead both the 3D studio and a team of graphic designers. Build brand books for both sides of the identity. And solve a problem no one at Zenly had tackled before: putting real people into a brand that had always been defined by abstract visuals.
The Creative Approach
I created Zenly's first 3D brand rules and its first 2D graphic identity — two parallel systems that needed to coexist without contradiction. Both had to feel distinctly Zenly. For the real-people challenge, I worked with the influencer team to develop a grassroots shoot approach: candid, unpolished, shot to feel like it came from any user's camera roll. The goal was a brand that felt human alongside the 3D world it had already built — and content that could be produced fast enough to stay relevant.
The team
We built this with 3D studio Makata and designer Nick Chiodo. I led both the 3D and 2D creative tracks, managing across disciplines while working closely with the marketing team to align output with growth objectives.
Production Highlights
Three first-of-their-kind deliverables at Zenly: the first-ever 3D brand rules, the first 2D graphic design system, and a grassroots influencer shoot framework for integrating real people into the brand. Followed by multilingual campaign execution across EU and US markets — at a production cadence the previous all-3D workflow could never have matched.
The Impact
During my tenure, Zenly reached 40 million monthly active users and 15 million daily active users — making it the tenth most downloaded social app globally. The first-ever 3D and 2D brand rules created during this period enabled multilingual campaigns across Europe and the US, fuelling the DAU and MAU expansion that made Zenly one of the fastest-growing social apps in the world at the time of its unexpected closure.
40M
Monthly active users at peak
15M
Daily active users during my tenure
Top 10
Social app globally
3M+
Downloads per month in early 2022
More Works
© 2026 JULES ALEXANDER. All rights reserved.