Role
Brand/UX Strategist
Project Type
8 Weeks
Project Length
Client Grad School Project- 6 person team
With Ace by Your Side, You’ll Never Fly Solo Again
Dating apps reward performance. The manosphere sells dominance. Neither actually builds confidence. As part of a graduate program in Strategic Communication Design, our six-person team took on a real client with a real question: how do you help young men get out of isolation without making them feel like a project? That became Ace.
I served as Brand and UX Strategist on the team. I wrote the creative brief, defined the brand positioning, built the voice and personality system, and co-developed the user flow from onboarding through challenge completion and reflection.
The Challenge
Young Men Deserve Better Than the Manosphere
A generation of young men is being shaped by an online culture that mistakes dominance for confidence and performance for connection. The self-improvement market has made it worse, not better. Most products in this space talk to men like they are broken and need fixing. The result is an audience that is isolated, skeptical, and already burned by advice that did not work.
Jacob came to us with a sketch and a genuine alternative. The product he imagined did not promise transformation. It offered practice. Our job was to build a brand and experience system credible enough to earn trust from people who had stopped trusting.
The Insight
Permission to Be a Beginner
Most self-improvement products promise to fix men. The problem is that "fix" implies broken. And when the program doesn't work, which it usually doesn't, men don't blame the product. They blame themselves.
The real barrier here was shame.
Young men are often less embarrassed by struggling socially than they are by admitting they need help with it. Once I saw that, the strategy became much clearer. Ace needed to feel like someone on your side. That decision shaped the product logic, the name, the voice, and the visual identity. The brand had to feel supportive first, then aspirational.
Brand Strategy
Take These Wings And Learn To Fly
The wings in the Ace logo wrap around the A rather than rising above it. That distinction matters. It makes the wingman idea literal. The brand is beside you, not ahead of you. The gradient moves from deep amber into sunrise orange, which brings warmth and forward motion without aggression. The form feels grounded. It rises with you rather than waiting for you at the top.
Every visual choice ran through the same filter: does this feel like support, or does it feel like pressure?
UX/UI
We took ACE’s early sketches and mapped a clear user flow, wireframing every step from onboarding to daily challenges. The final design pairs bold, confidence-driven visuals with an intuitive interface that meets users where they are — and pushes them just far enough outside their comfort zone. Each screen is built to reinforce the brand’s mission: turn small wins into lasting social confidence.
Key Take Ways
This project taught me that strategy matters most when the audience is already skeptical.
The men Ace was built for had tried self-improvement before. They had watched the videos, read the threads, and still felt stuck. That meant the brand could not oversell. Any hint of transformation language, any promise that felt too large, would confirm what they already suspected: that this was just another product that did not understand them.
The constraint that made the work better was also the hardest one to hold onto. We had early conversations about building a community feature into the product. I pushed back on it. Community sounds like connection, but for this audience it risked becoming another place to consume content and call it growth. The product needed to move people off screens, not give them a better reason to stay on them. Keeping that boundary made the challenge-based design more honest.
If I were doing this again, I would spend more time testing the tone of the challenge prompts with real users. We made confident decisions about voice, but the moment the product speaks directly to someone feeling anxious, every word carries more weight than it does in a brand book.