Branding Alma
Introducing the world’s first nutrition companion.
It’s the week after Thanksgiving as I’m hitting publish on this case study. The time of year where families of all shapes, sizes, cultures, and dietary restrictions gather around the table to share a meal. The last thing that’s probably on your mind right now is tracking what you just ate or are planning to eat over the next month. So I figured it’s the *perfect time* to drop a case study on a food tracking companion app thing! Just bookmark this and come back to it on January 1st.
Let’s get this out of the way, food tracking is boring, tedious, and most of the time very bland.
It needs to be said. These apps are usually designed to be just as bland as the meals they’re tracking. Purely a transaction, with little to no soul involved. But in an ideal world, you should be able to track the foods that you alsoooo actually enjoy eating. Foods that have flavor. Foods that give you more than just energy, they give you life.
Well, dream no longer abs seeking smoothie guzzler. Sign up for the beta of Alma today. (At the time of writing, this is a limited beta. But you can sign up for the waitlist for the early 2025 launch.)
Bringing soul to the table.
I’ll admit when we met Rami Alhamad and Adam Noffsinger from Alma, they had to do some convincing to get us on board. Because, like we mentioned above, this space is crowded and most of what’s out there is a bit lame. But as we got deeper into what they were offering, it became more about culture and the celebration of food. Rami mentioned that if you eat Indian or Ethiopian food, it’s almost impossible to log your meals on the other apps. And most of the time people drop off, because the apps make them feel guilty for not logging consistently.
Alma is building a nutrition companion that meets you where you are and tracks actual imperfect human activity, not the gym rat robot that these other apps seem to assume their users are. You contain multitudes, and cheese.
The more we thought about it, the more we felt like this is the perfect space to inject some soul and liveliness. This is where it will be noticed most. It’s much easier to stand out in a sea of bland with a really good brand.
It wouldn’t be an app in 2024 without AI!
Nutrition tracking apps are pretty much worthless if you’re not using them every day. So the Alma folks wanted to use warmth and friendliness of their brand to build a nutrition companion app that encourages people rather than guilts them into using it on the regular.
They use AI to help fill in the gaps when logging, making it super easy to catch up when you’ve fallen off the wagon for a bit. They also use AI to suggest customized recipes based on your history, goals, and personal preferences. I don’t have any jokes for this paragraph, sorry readers.
A for Alma
When I was younger, so much younger than today. I used to be like…Strategy? Pointless. Positioning? Waste of time. I just wanna make cool logos that look cool. Turns out strategy and positioning are how cool logos get made. Who knew! This became so integral to our process that I married our strategist. And also for other reasons.
For this brand, Chara did such a great job with the positioning that a logo just sort of fell out of it.
A key part of positioning is brand pillars—three attributes that, together, make this offering unique. Like, what makes this special? Usually, one or two pillars are table stakes. But at least one of them has to make you pause for a hot second and say wait, that IS different. For Alma, our brand pillars are: Nutrition Tracking, Personal Insights, and Flavor Discovery. Are other apps doing nutrition tracking? Yes. Do some of them offer AI powered personal insights? A few. But toss flavor discovery in there, and suddenly you’re doing something new.
We use brand pillars as conceptual guidelines and inspiration anytime we’re building a brand—but for this one, we took things a bit further and injected the pillars right into the brand symbol.
Pro tip: it’s easier to sell through a good logo when it’s tied directly to a pre-approved strategy.
When you see the Alma brand symbol, at first glance you might just see some shapes that roughly resemble an A. At second glance you might see a person looking at a recipe book while prepping dinner. At thirrrrd glance, when you look a bit longer, you can see that it’s directly tied to the three pillars. I’m obviously always looking for strategic pillars when I look at logos.
Each logo element represents a pillar. The open journal represents personal insights. The bowl shows how you can discover new flavors with Alma’s recipe suggestion feature. And the circle at the top represents a person, or the tracking macros that are a major part of the product design.
It’s so rare to get three separate symbols in a logo that play nicely together, let alone three symbols that actually mean anything to the company. When Summer made this we all looked at each other and said, “Welp, this is perfect.”
We were so happy with how this symbol turned out, not only because of the symbolism and meaning baked into it, but also because it has a timeless quality that feels like it can outlast any kind of trend. No gloopiness. No 3D. No gradients. Just a really solid classic looking symbol that would feel at home in the 1960s as well as the 2030s. Because—that’s right—we’re only FIVE YEARS AWAY FROM IT BEING 2030?! When I’m reading this in 2030 I’m going to be like wow, what a 2025 thing to say.
Because the logo is broken down into three separate elements, it’s extremely scalable too. It can work massively on the side of a building or teeeeeeny tiny as a favicon. It can even work as a stencil which comes in handy from time to time.
Another bonus is that you can replace each piece of the logo like a collage. You can make the logo out of foods, leaves, paper scraps, bowls, 3D elements, human teeth, and anything else you can imagine. Trust me we tried it all and so has AI.
Collage me like one of your Spanish girls.
You may have noticed by now that collages are a major part of the Alma brand language, and this section is here to tell you why.
Rami and Adam landed on the name Alma, which is Spanish for soul. Rami was telling us about a trip to Spain and how he got swept up in the art, the culture, and the food. He was like, I know this is going to sound crazy but when I close my eyes and think of the Alma brand, it’s very painterly, exciting, and vibrant. Food is art, so why not inject that into the brand?
Easy peasy. I’ll just whip out my brushes and oil paints and get cracking.
One major issue, however, was that the Alma team is planning to include a visual anytime someone adds a meal they’ve eaten into the app. That’s literally thousands of images. Probably millions. The Alma team wanted the app to feel flavorful and fresh, so they didn’t want to buy a standard pack of photos from iStock or wherever. Stock sites are just out here cashing in on the most boring photo of a chicken dinner known to mankind. WELL I SAY, NOT ANYMORE!
Weird but relevant aside, we were introduced to the Alma folks via Colin Dunn from Visual Electric. So as we were thinking about this artistic food angle we were like, hmmmm what if we fire up an AI generator and see what it spits out? If we could wrangle this thing to make food images properly, we could solve the thousands of images problem beautifully.
What came out of this exercise was pure magic. And also some dog shit. But mostly magic.
At the end of the day, isn’t cooking kind of just making a collage out of food?
The first pass was very painterly and normal looking. Pretty, but not ownable in any way and would prob get old fast. In classic AI fashion it started randomly putting stuff in weird places. We almost gave up because it was too inconsistent to actually implement in any kind of responsible way. Then things took a sort of surrealist-ish turn, in a good way.
In a desperate attempt to figure out a solution that actually worked, we started trying all different kinds of filters and prompts, attempting to eliminate all the weird AI misplacements. Then we landed on the idea of collage, and it opened the door to a visual style that became central to the entire brand.
When your final visual is a collage of foods, rather than striving for accurate depictions, it gives a little more grace to a weird stem popping out of a cut tomato, or a watermelon that looks like a sailboat. You’re kinda just like, “Well it’s a collage, it’s supposed to be weird!” So we got to work generating dozens of these things. And well, it just worked. The more we played with it, the better we got at getting the results we needed.
The good, the bad, and the heinous.
We showed this to the Alma folks and they were fully, massively on board. They were SO on board that decided to add Visual Electric-esque collage generation right into Alma. Soon, you’ll be able to enter any kind of recipe into the app, and it will generate a custom collage out of the ingredients. Which is a great feature for a food tracking app that also suggests customized recipes based on your tummy troubles.
The gifs shown here were straight from Visual Electric. Above, you can see it generated some truly unique and beautiful collages that work well for anything brand related.
And here, you can see it also generated some truly heinous and sometimes nightmare-ish stuff as well. AI loves fruits and veggies and has absolutely no idea what to do with raw meat. It throws random eyes in weird places and even a sperm found its way into some sort of granola bar??? Leopard? Sure, toss it in! Could I interest you in some conjoined chicken wings?? With recent advances in genetically engineered food, the conjoined chicken wings don’t seem as dystopian as they should.
The collages were also a nice thing to use as background elements for the app icon. I feel like app icons are getting a little bit more fun and personalized these days so why not add the ability to customize it a bit, while still feeling on brand.
Founding Designers 🤝 Smith & Diction
Side note: this year has been a very interesting one for us from a process perspective. Post Perplexity, we’ve been working more and more with Founding Designers on their brand concepts. It’s honestly been an incredible change of pace for us. We get to hand off identity systems to folks that can then take the work and implement it without too much hand holding.
It’s been an absolute delight, and we hope to do more of this as time goes on. Are you a founding designer reading this? Are you really good with design but have no idea how to make a really solid logo and brand system? Give us a̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ an email. (Please don’t call.)
This kind of partnership has been bringing us more and more into the realm of UI/product design. Most of the time, these founding designers are really good product designers. So when they come to us, they have a lot of the product built and just ask us to help with the sticky spots that could use a hint of brand to help get users through a particular interaction, or to make the experience feel a little bit more special, unexpected, or ownable.
I’ll say this with my full chest, we are not product designers and will never claim to know what we are doing in the product design world. BUT we love looking for those special places in a digital product where we can have a surprise and delight moment with brand. How many times have you seen a dope brand and then the product looked like it was built by a completely different department? We’re trying our best to bring those two things a bit closer together.
All the designs we make in the brand concept phase are just that, concepts. For Alma, we took a stab at a few different ways to treat the product so they could pick which they liked best and run with it on their own.
This has been a great way to test brand typefaces and colors across an entire brand. A bold color or a quirky condensed typeface that looks dope in marketing materials might not even come close to working across product, where you don’t want brand to overpower usability.
Honestly, it’s been an eye-opening experience to think like a product designer lately. When you hand off a brand that has zero consideration on how it might show up in the digital space, it makes total sense as to why the brand might end up feeling disconnected. The digital folks kinda have to decide how it shows up in product on the fly.
Be responsible with your file handoffs kids. Only you can prevent dumpster fires.
This sentiment goes both ways, as they say! We recently got handed a brand from one of “the big boys” that was fully built in Figma. 100% RGB. No print based colors or guidelines at all. And then the client asked us to make a bunch of materials for an event…and so we totally had to make up everything on the spot. Not great Bob.
Speaking of style guides. Does anyone read things?
Making a style guide in the year 2024 is kind of an existential question at this point. Will anyone open it? Where do you make it? Figma? Standards? Illustrator? InDesign? (RIP) How do we define an AI prompt so a team can actually make their own images? Do we select a native font to use in Instagram stories? How important are fallback Google fonts? How do we hand the brand off to an influencer? It seems so silly to try to “define” anything in today’s brand landscape where everything is changing dramatically from day to day. Tools are constantly updating. New tools are popping up literally every single day. Honestly, it’s a bit exhausting.
But when you’re designing a brand and handing off an identity, you sort of need to just pick a moment in time and define that moment as best as you possibly can. The only thing constant is change, so we might as well embrace it.
We usually include the language “This is a style guide, not a rule book” at the beginning to encourage folks to see that any style guide is a living, breathing document that will not be perfect—but it will be a good place to start.
I have to give credit where credit is due, Dayan worked so hard on this document. For the first time ever, we were handing off a brand that incorporated AI generated images. How the hell do you hand something like that off? And I think Dayan did an absolutely wonderful job breaking down all of the little nuances in a digestible way that is super easy to replicate. We included sample prompts and even highlighted the sections that should be edited to get different results in a similar visual style.
I wish I could tell you there was an easy way to get here, but it truly just came from hours (maybe days) of just messing around, prompting anything and everything to see what works. We got it to a place where it can create something that feels on brand a majority of the time, which we are thrilled with.
The Alma brand was a fun one to make and I hope that comes through in the work. I know we’ll prob catch some guff from the purists for using AI imagery, but I like to keep as much of an open mind about new tools as humanly possible. It’s better to try new things than to be that old man yells at cloud meme. I’m super proud of this work and I’m excited to see how it scales up in the future. Maybe I’ll download this app and lose this Lexapro gut I can’t seem to shake.
If you’re interested in trying it out yourself, sign up for the waitlist today at alma.food.
Did you like this project? Do you want to work with us? Let’s do it.
Shoot us an email at → hello@smith-diction.com. We love talking to all kinds of folks. Even if we can’t work with you for some reason, we’ll try to intro you to someone who can.
Symbol & Product Design Concepts: Summer McClure
Wordmark, Brand Design, & Style Guide: Dayan D’Aniello
AI Generation & Motion: Tully Ryan
Brand Design & Creative Direction: Mike Smith
Copywriting & Strategy: Chara Smith
Want to post this work? Here’s a link to all of the press images.
