Case Study
Mia
Mia is an AI conversation partner that helps people practice real language skills without the pressure of streaks or rigid schedules. The founder had a working product but a prototype that looked like every other language learning app. I built the brand from the ground up — identity, component library, and conversion-focused landing page — and gave Mia a visual presence that finally matched what the product was actually about.
Brand Design Product Design AI Art Direction
The Brief
Mia is an AI conversation partner that helps people practice real language skills — without streaks, pressure, or rigid schedules. The founder had a working product but a prototype that looked like every other language learning app: plain, utilitarian, no visual personality. Nothing in the UI communicated the warmth and approachability the product was actually built around.
The ask was clear: build the brand from the ground up and extend it into the product and marketing. That meant starting with identity — before touching a single screen.
The Approach
The first thing I did was establish the visual foundation, because everything else — components, landing page, imagery — needed to pull from the same source.
Mia needed to feel like a conversation, not a curriculum. The brand had to be warm and modern without tipping into generic edtech. I made three deliberate choices to get there:
Typography: Lexend as the primary typeface — a warm sans-serif with strong readability credentials, originally designed to reduce visual stress for people with reading difficulties. The right call for a product built around making language feel accessible.
Colour: A palette of indigo, lemon, and petal. Energetic but not loud. Friendly without being childish. A combination that holds up across app UI and marketing surfaces without feeling like it belongs to either category specifically.
Illustration: A style that puts real people in real situations alongside a recurring AI character — Mia herself. Rather than using stock illustration or abstract shapes, I used FLORA to art-direct and generate imagery that gave Mia a face and a presence. This wasn't a production shortcut — the AI-directed imagery became a core part of how the brand communicates warmth and builds trust at first glance on the landing page.
The Work
With the brand foundation in place, the project expanded outward into three connected layers.
Brand system: Full identity documentation covering logo usage, colour palette, typography scale, imagery direction, and tone of voice anchors. Built to be handed off and used consistently as the product grows.
Component library: 30+ components built in Figma for direct developer handoff — covering typography, colour tokens, interactive states, and the core UI patterns the app needed. The developer built from these files directly, which compressed the implementation timeline and avoided the usual round of interpretation errors between design and code.
Landing page: Designed for conversion, desktop and mobile. The brief was to position Mia as a credible, trustworthy product ahead of its full launch — not just to look good, but to give a visitor a clear reason to sign up. The AI-directed imagery does real work here: it makes the product feel human before a user has even tried it.
The Result
A cohesive product identity that works across the app and marketing surface — built from nothing to production-ready in a single project scope.
The landing page is live at fluentwithmia.com. The component library with 30+ components is actively in use as the product continues to develop toward its mobile app launch.