Brand Identity For Cerca Dating App
A dating app identity built for subway walls—not just app screens.
Saint-Urbain crafted a bold and flexible identity for Cerca, a Gen Z-focused dating app built around mutual connections and trust. The design balances structure with warmth, using expressive illustrations, confident typography, and restrained layouts to communicate authenticity and approachability across digital and out-of-home channels.
Insights
- Saint-Urbain’s core strategy was to spotlight Cerca’s real product advantage—dating “through mutuals” for accountability, familiarity, and trust—because that story “wasn’t being told clearly or confidently enough.”
- The identity deliberately avoids “traditional dating cues” and “tech-forward visuals,” instead using a bold, flexible system: confident typography + expressive hand-drawn illustrations, with restrained layouts where “spacing, restraint, and composition” carry the message.
- Out-of-home is treated as a primary launch channel: minimal copy and strong visual hierarchy designed to cut through crowded urban environments, with the system needing to feel “just as natural on a subway wall as it did inside the app.”
- The product mechanics reinforce the brand themes of safety and intention: only 1st/2nd-degree connections after syncing contacts, anonymous likes until mutual, four swipes a day to reduce “swiping fatigue,” and matches revealed daily at 8PM EST; CEO Myles Slayton says, “We simply don’t trust strangers,” and “There is no world where you should be seeing 100 profiles in a minute.”
- Credits and leadership: the brand work lists Creative Director Alex Ostroff with creative team Allison Gutman and Genaro Garmilla; the system was built to extend beyond the app into events, merchandise, and “community-driven experiences,” framing Cerca as a broader social ecosystem—not just a dating platform.
- Saint Urbain Makes Cerca Unmistakable In The Crowded Dating Category — the-brandidentity.com
- Saint Urbain Cerca Animation Graphic Design Project 020326 — itsnicethat.com
