Du Qingyu and Dong Xiuxiu · CLIENT: Piggy Express Creative Design Team
Piggy Express is a brand character design created for a ride hailing service. The character develops the pig icon of the brand logo into a friendly travel companion. A high saturation color scheme increases visual visibility by 42 percent, and an independent silhouette keeps the character recognizable across all media. Animations guide users through tasks such as coupon redemption and route tracking. The character was refined through thirty rounds of shape iteration and tested with more than one hundred users in Chinese cities.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The design went through 30 rounds of shape iteration, and was tested among more than 100 users from first, second and third tier cities in China, to verify its cross regional cultural acceptance and visual recognition. The multi level sampling focused on two core indicators, visual recognition speed and user affinity. Empirical data from different urban demographic groups guided the optimization of the structure and core visual features of the character. The high saturation color scheme increases the visual visibility of the character by 42 percent, and the independent silhouette design ensures recognizability in all media scenes.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The sizes depend of the media where it is applied
- Tags
- Brand Character Design, Visual Identity Design, Visual Communication, IP, Emotional Brand, Gamified Experience, User Research, Commercial Conversion
- Production Technology
- The visual system is made with Adobe Creative Suite, Cinema 4D, and Octane Render, with standardized specifications to ensure IP consistency and extensibility across digital, physical, and vehicle media, solving industry adaptation problems.
- Design Challenge
- The core challenge of this project is to transform static brand visual symbols into a complete brand character IP with emotional value. We must ensure the character carries the brand's emotional tone while retaining high recognizability across complex multi scene applications. By balancing a friendly visual style with a unified brand specification system, we integrate the character into the brand's full channel visual system, helping it build differentiated competitiveness in a homogenized market.
- Project Duration
- Launched in Beijing in 2024, the project continues to iterate across multiple scenarios including digital interfaces, vehicle livery, and collaborative activities.
It now covers full-channel communication and serves more than 1,000,000 users. - Operation Flow
- The Brand Character functions as a living interface element. Through anthropomorphic animations, Piggy Express Character guides users through complex workflows, such as coupon redemption and route tracking. These purposeful micro-interactions have catalyzed a 35% increase in daily active engagement, turning routine tasks into moments of delight. The derivative ecosystem, covering both physical and digital touchpoints, maintains a positive sentiment rate of over 90%, proving that emotional design is a powerful driver for brand affinity and commercial conversion.
- Research
- This study addresses the emotional coldness and functional homogenization in the ride hailing sector. By establishing a multi dimensional evaluation model, we bridged the gap between visual recognition and emotional resonance. The process involved targeted user surveys and iterative testing across multi tier Chinese cities. The final design aligns brand visual identity with emotional value against traditional industry schemes. This project offers a quantifiable, reusable framework for transforming transactional services into humanized brand experiences.
- Inspiration
- The ride hailing industry is highly homogenized, with most brands prioritizing functional efficiency over emotional connection with users, leading to generally low user brand affinity. This project was created to fill this gap. The character inherits and evolves the core visual elements of the official logo of the brand, redefining the pig icon, a widely recognized symbol of savings, into a friendly travel companion, reshaping the emotional tone of the brand, and humanizing the digital mobility experience for users.
- Image Credits
- Piggy Express
Press releases are available in 1 languages.