Turning up the heat: Feeld’s rebrand, born of collaboration, is charged with electricity and energy

Sculpting a space for sex-positive, open-minded explorations, the widely popular dating app Feeld has been gaining momentum for quite a while now. Its community, which it has both found and created, is at the heart of everything at Feeld, including its rebrand. The rebrand was a result of many moving parts – a strategic foundation from Concept Bureau, design by Made Thought, a typographic treatment defined by Charlotte Rohde, and photography by Molly Matalon. Both Rohde and Matalon are Feeld members, as are each of the people featured in the campaign – rooting the rebrand in details and moments crafted by creatives who are intimately aware of Feeld’s universe.

“The world is changing, especially the cultural scripts around sexuality, identity and relationships. It is important to us that we evolve along with the needs and tastes of our community – while also being visible to those who don’t know we exist, but are looking for what Feeld offers,” Andrew Peet, VP of Creative, tells us, regarding the impetus for the rebrand. “As other platforms in the space inch closer to us, we want to continue to be trailblazers in our category.” In this shedding of its skin, the only thing Feeld retained was its name – transforming everything else, to point to a new era for the brand and its members.

Ideas of fluidity and energy are injected into this new world in refreshing new ways. The type, for example, designed by Berlin-based Rohde, moves and shifts, with the edges of the characters bleeding into each other at times. A custom version of one of her variable typefaces, Rohde tweaked the design in collaboration with the brand’s internal team to make it just right for Feeld. Together, they also created a custom set of ligatures – ‘beautiful moments of connection built right into the character set’ – that add another level of uniqueness and individuality to the typography.

For Rohde, who had taken a break from design work to concentrate on her writing and art practice, the opportunity to contribute to the reshaping of an app she’s closely familiar with came as a welcome surprise. “I was already a Feeld user, and the rebrand fulfilled my personal desires for the app. The interface, in essence, shapes the pathways through which our desires flow, making the design instrumental in how we experience love and intimacy,” she tells us. “Throughout this journey, I had an incredibly fulfilling experience, feeling truly heard, seen, and understood. This is precisely what we all yearn for.”

The energy of Rohde’s typographic treatment is echoed throughout the rest of the visual system, perfected through an open-door collaboration between Feeld and Made Thought. Together, the two teams tackled the challenge of sculpting a fresh direction for Feeld, resulting in a space that fosters a sense of genuine community and connection. “With Made Thought being leaders in the brand design space with a perspective rooted in future thinking, we were guaranteed to be a powerful pair. They share in our desire to disrupt the status quo, and reimagine what the future of connection can look and feel like,” shares Nyomi Warren, Lead Brand Designer. “We knew they could understand the nuances of Feeld and the communities we serve.”

And understand, they did. A sense of movement and transformation – intrinsic to Feeld, and the people it caters to – is felt in the brand’s new motion language, and the sensitivity with which it approaches its new world of colours. The motion seems to have a life of its own, with elements breathing, pulsing, and flowing, igniting moments of discovery and connection throughout the app, and also in the way it communicates with the world. The path that led to the colours, on the other hand, was a bit more complex. After weeks of testing gradients created with software and code, the team pivoted to a different approach. “We worked with a diverse group of movement professionals (dancers, performers, actors) and captured moments of touching, caressing, and movement,” Warren reveals. “Made Thought created custom treatments for the footage – inspired by aura photography and heat mapping cameras that visualise unseen energies – to create a library of rich, seemingly abstract colour fields.”

These ‘auras,’ which represent vivid connection, are reserved for emotive moments in the product, “such as connecting or liking a fellow member,” as Warren describes, and are also seen across visuals for events, packaging, merchandise and other digital touchpoints. In a way, the team’s approach to the new chromatic output captures the essence of the overarching rebrand – favouring fluidity over rigidity, celebrating the energy of people, and finding moments to revel in the joy of tender intimacy, or the electric excitement of a new relationship.

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