Kuwaiti sports app Li3ib evolves with shapeshifting bilingual identity
The design system revolves around a new logo that works seamlessly in Arabic and English and bends to form sporty mascots
Li3ib, a Kuwait-based sports reservation app facilitating movement, has received a suitably dynamic brand refresh from design studio Hondo.Studio, which Beattie+Dane, an advertising agency based in Kuwait, enlisted to give the brand a total makeover.
Remnants of Li3ib’s past as a booking platform for football were present in its branding, so the sports app required a new identity that captured a wide range of sporting facilities that could entice all sports players, from casual exercisers to serious athletes with a strict schedule.
As Li3ib is spelt using a phonetic variation of Arabic, where numbers replace letters that don’t exist in the English alphabet, the sports app also wanted an iconography-based vehicle to brand Li3ib away from the name and into an icon.
Hondo.Studio’s Maria Vioque and Fran Méndez led the design and art direction, creating a design system that balances the app’s digital functionality with sports’ social aspect, which Li3ib has since rolled out across its website, app, social media and advertising in Kuwait.
Dipping into a palette of baby pink, forest green, vibrant red, and emerald green, the brand’s OG green was retained with complementing colours that infuse energy or calm, depending on the activity.
The playful (but professional) design system revolves around a new logo that works seamlessly in Arabic and English (a nod to Kuwait’s bilingual culture) and bends up, down and around to form a bunch of charming cartoonish mascots engaging in various sporting activities.
The squiggly cartoons are accompanied by inspiring lines that demonstrate the app’s usability, such as ‘every match starts here’, ‘exercising made seamless’, and ‘dive in, stress out’.
With the shapeshifting strokes and bouncing motion, the graphics effortlessly switch between Arabic and English. Commercial Type’s neo-grotesque Graphik font appears across all visual elements of the brand refresh.
The abstract graphics, which layer upon each other to suggest movement, bring Li3ib’s versatile logo and shapeshifting squiggles to life.
