Applause

Applause is the indie-app studio run by indie-app developers and aficionados. Unlike their competitors who buy apps only to strip them for parts and sell them for profit, Applause stewards their apps with diligence and passion. In a world of bottom-line deals and profit margins, Applause is focused on giving apps the tools to reach their full potential, in order to make lives better for their users. These are the good guys, a company that’s obsessed with the details and respects the hard work of app builders. And they needed a brand that reflected that.

The brand’s visual expression started with a key strategic insight: Applause not only buys successful apps, but thoughtfully cultivates and grows them. If competitors are app warehouses, Applause is the garden in which apps can flourish.

How do you convey to potential indie app devs that you’re one of them? With a visual language that feels both familiar and innovative, like the enduring consumer tech brands. Leading with elements inspired by Apple — like Garamond, its famed font, and streamlined minimalism — every aspect of the brand reflects the sense of honesty and technical aptitude from tech’s early days. But instead of going purely retro, we took those 70s inspired elements and paired them with more modern, contemporary flourishes that made the brand feel fresh and different. Like the brand’s new mark — an homage to IBM’s resilient and renowned 8-bar logo — every aspect of Applause’s new look communicated a reverence for technology and an ethos for innovation.

Early tech colors, like royal blue, black and white, were also rethought through modern, bold imagery. Apple’s famed negative photo treatments were approached with a new kind of attitude, and paired with additional photo elements made with Studio Freight’s open-sourced ASCII Texture. Illustrations took inspiration from the 8-bit style of the 70s, but were instead applied to lush, organic imagery of unbridled growth.

The result was an incredibly thoughtful, laser-focused brand without frills or excess (just like the apps in Applause’s portfolio), but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for playfulness. On the website, we included moments and easter eggs that gave a wink to other indie-app die-hards, like corner radiuses that match the same ones Apple uses in its app store. From each click to every intentionally placed design element, the experience is purposefully referential, but purely, and totally, Applause.