Joyi
A mental health education app that builds resilience in youth through bite-sized, science-backed lessons — designed around a non-human companion anyone could relate to.
CLIENT
Colorful Zone (in-house)
YEAR
2023-2024
ROLE
Creative Lead
SCOPE
Character design, UI, brand, merchandise
Brief
Anxiety treatment is well-funded. Anxiety prevention isn't. Joyi was an in-house Colorful Zone product built to fill that gap — a mental health app for youth that teaches resilience before crisis, not after it. The design problem was reaching young people who don't think of themselves as needing therapy, in a category that usually feels clinical or aesthetically tied to a specific demographic.
Approach
The character came first. Joyi is a glowing, abstract form — no gender, no race, no human features beyond expression. A relatable companion for anxiety can't be specific, because the moment it is, half the audience stops seeing themselves in it.
From the character outward, the rest followed. The UI puts Joyi in conversation with the user — check-ins phrased as questions a friend would ask, lessons paced like a chat rather than a curriculum, progress framed as time given to yourself.
App Design
Social Media
Merchandise
The merchandise line extended Joyi from a screen companion into a physical one. Users could put the character on their laptop, their wall, their morning routine.
Outcome
Joyi reached 12,000+ users within six months of launch. A research collaboration with Seneca College measured the app's impact on student users and found a significant reduction in anxiety levels — turning what could have been a soft "wellness" claim into evidence. Users didn't describe Joyi as an app. They described it as a companion. That was the test the design had to pass.
