Essense

Essense started as a side project inside Optic. It collected reviews from app stores and drew them: a line of positive against negative, a table by week, a chatbot you had to know how to ask.

Nobody could say how to create a project, where to read the analysis, or how to break it down. The data was all there. The conclusions weren’t.

I started inside what existed: fix the worst, keep the rest. Sources moved into the project, so a new project took four screens instead of nine. The projects list lost its search, sorting and filters; it had been built for dozens of projects, and people had one or two.

That fixed getting started. The page you land on still showed data instead of answers, so the review turned into a redesign.

The old wordmark was stencil capitals on a dark admin. The new one is lowercase, and the “e” carries a line chart: the product pulls a signal out of noise, and the mark says so. The weight grows across the word, 100 to 700 — the essence surfacing from thin noise.

It’s built on Inter, so the brand and the interface share one typeface. The interface was drawn after, in the brand’s blue.

The price: the chart doesn’t read at icon size, so the icon uses the “e” alone. The lettering is drawn by hand and can’t be typed.

The same brand and screens went into the pitch deck. By then Essense had 1,800+ users, and from July to September 2023 it grew 100 % a month.

I was the only designer, working with the founders and Optic’s engineering team. After the redesign the product went its own way and carried on without me.