Pnyka’s Personality
Pnyka — 2018
I joined Pnyka when it was just an idea. The cofounders had conducted research on the concept and tested them through real-life versions of conversations, but that was it. After gaining a clear idea of the problem and proposed solution, understanding key feature requirements, and doing some initial ideation, I decided that I needed to create a personality for our brand before I could go any further.
Creating an identity
Defining Our Mission
Examining this core purpose of our company is vital - you can’t create an identity unless you understand the underlying goals! After meeting with the cofounders, we defined our mission as: providing an environment of learning based on mutual respect and the discussion of important societal issues, where every individual has a right to a voice and the ability to discover a variety of viewpoints.
Uncovering Value add
Next, I wanted to dig deeper into what made us unique. What were we doing that would better the user in a way that they couldn’t already? There are plenty of online platforms that allowed the discussion of difficult topics — so what made us better?
A few key differences we uncovered are:
Our strong focus on facilitating conversations that are first and foremost respectful.
Our emphasis on creating genuine conversations - not debate!
Our encouragement for users to embrace differing viewpoints and learn from them.
Our goal of, not changing peoples views, but strengthening connections through openness and understanding of the “other side”
Our structured format that creates an environment for safe, yet honest conversations.
Our insistence that Pnyka is for everyone of all ages.
Where we landed
After my initial explorations with the cofounders, I found that the aspects that we really wanted to convey through our product were: comfort, respect, and honesty. The app needed to convey a certain level of respect, while also having a certain degree of warmth to ensure the user feels comfortable being him/herself. I wanted the app to feel like your favorite teacher — the teacher that makes you actually enjoy learning, the one you are comfortable approaching after class to ask questions, the one whom you respect and admire, the one who makes you want to better.
Colors & branding
The color purple as our primary color seemed to be a no-brainer. Purple has a dignified quality to it, yet manages to still feel warm and approachable. Further, we didn’t want our app to be perceived as having any sort of political lean. This is, after all, the complete opposite of our mission! The blending of red and blue to make purple seemed like a lovely example of our overarching goal of facilitation connection.
As a secondary color, we wanted something that complimented the purple as well as a color we could use to positively encourage the user as they used the app. Green is traditionally used to convey positive notions - your device is charged, proceed through the intersection, and so on. This was the exact compliment to purple we were looking for.
For the interface, we wanted to keep it clean. I knew very simple and sleek would work best. As beautiful and fun as flashy, gradient-brimming apps are today, I wanted our content to be the focus of the app. We also hoped that keeping everything very simple would give the platform a sense of professionalism. This was important because we would be discussing potentially difficult topics on the platform and needed users to take these discussions seriously.
Greek theme
We decided to incorporate small Greek elements throughout the app to serve as homage to the origins of our name, Pnyka. This also was a great way to balance the professional yet approachable (and a pinch fun!) vibe we were going for. Some examples of this were: stylized images of the original hill, Pnyx, as well as Greek images used as our anonymous user bubbles in our chat feature.
Marketing materials
Later, when our product was more established, I created a marketing packet for our customers. We realized in order to set them up for success, we had to help them communicate to users the benefit of our platform for their community members.