hi TELEGRAM STICKERS
Illustration; Character Design
hi is a not-for-profit financial service that markets itself as the world’s first universal cross-ecosystem mobile payment and financial services platform. Built on Blockchain and brought to a global audience via chat platforms, it serves as a digital bank with a mission to make finance inclusive, fair, and fee-less for all. Its member centric service enables users the ability to send both fiat and cryptocurrencies seamlessly to friends and merchants through the hi app or on a chat platform of choice, earn rewards just by signing up and referring friends, purchase hi Dollars, earn excellent rates of up to 20% pa., and more. When hi launched in April of this year, phase one rolled out by membership signup through popular chat services—Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Line to start. After just over two months of private beta, hi reached 500,000 members from around the world. To celebrate this remarkable feat, I was commissioned to design and release a set of custom stickers that aim to enhance the user experience of Telegram users.
My goal was to create a set of stickers that timelessly reflects the company’s existing brand identity, as well as implement effective character design. When building the hi mascot, the biggest problem the team and I saw was the abundant use of coin-shaped characters that represented financial platforms, particularly in the crypto space. While this is understandable for currencies like Bitcoin, we wanted to steer away from focusing on hi as being just the token/hi Dollar, and position it as a lifestyle brand for millennials and Gen Z instead. Here, we saw an opportunity to create a mascot that would help to express emotive reactions through a brighter and more energetic approach. As a solve, the decision to use an (alien) astronaut as hi’s “spokesman” came from the “to the moon” references that all crypto followers are familiar with. The following launch of 23 stickers show the funky mascot in various landscapes (on vacation, the moon, on a rocket), commonly used emotions (anger, joy, laughter, etc.), and relatable meme references that appeal to the target audience (this is fine, stay calm, and HODL).
