Yarn is an app that looks to end phone addiction by looking more upstream for the root cause - Why are you instinctively tapping into apps in the first place?
When the pre-designated use time for an app ends, the app is blocked, and you're prompted to journal to unlock it again. AI prompts are available to prod you along if you're stuck. These prompts are genuinely thoughtful, empathetic and consider the context of what you have written already.
We wanted the design to be warm, whimsical, and inviting - A place to detangle your thoughts before you throw it under the rug with another doomscroll.
Ash was really the visionary for this work, and I was so grateful to be a part of the design and marketing process.
doodles to brand
The concept for yarn was that it 'untangles your thoughts' into a more cohesive 'yarn' ball - seeing this as the main culprit for many of the times we turn to our phones. We wanted the character to be simple and hand-drawn, as well as naturally warm and inviting.
The problem was that it had to be a ball of yarn + also a logo that could be played around with + maintain a certain character. Would the app logo itself have the ball? Just the face? The face alone had to give a sense of a ball of yarn in itself. We settled with a more situational approach, where sometimes the face would be by itself, and other times it would be complete with the ball.
onboarding!
The concept of the app is super clear to me now, but fixing phone addiction through journalling is not exactly an immediately intuitive idea. A short onboarding to more intuitively teach this concept was needed. Ultimately it had to feel beautiful. Hand-drawn, with care.
This onboarding screen was featured by @spottedinprod shortly after, too!
promo vid
We really only had one goal shooting this - Get it during golden hour. Because how many beautiful windows of this time had been missed looking down at a screen?
The yarn app is free to download in the app store. If fixing your phone addiction was an abandonded new years resolution for this year, why not try again? See link below to download xx
