&Walsh makes over friendship app Lex with stickers representing queer vernacular

Lex and &Walsh have teamed up for a fantastic new project. The design studio is helping Lex reposition from a dating app for LGBTQIA+ folk (the brand actually began on Instagram as an old school personal ads site) to a site for making friends and finding community. The concept is wonderful; a censorship-free, safe space for queer people to connect and find “plant babysitters” or “knitting clubs”, the press release offers a few examples. For &Walsh, the challenge was finding a way to represent this visually. How do you create a “queer playground”?

It’s hard to know what part of the identity to shout about first, but a major feature are the custom stickers. Across the brand, you’ll find fun, abstract illustrations of flames, hearts, flowers, mountains and stars, made to convey feelings of growth and wellbeing. “Language is also important to the queer community as a means of self expression, identification and empowerment, so the copy for these stickers were written by and for queer people, ensuring that they’re authentic,” says Motti, copywriter at &Walsh. The stickers are available on and offline to represent pronouns, interests and more.

Unlike other social apps, where gender non-conforming users have to make-do with standardised options, Lex has Lexmojis. “Our goal with Lexmojis is to provide an alternative option to profile photos for users who want to remain anonymous on Lex,” a spokesperson from Lex explains. To get Lexmojis right, Lex worked directly with the community, gathering suggestions like “none of these give me a femme vibe”, and adapting accordingly. The final variety of emojis represent “all sorts of queer identities, like the winking scarf Lexmoji for our fems, the cyclist Lexmoji for our sporty babes, and the beanie Lexmoji for our soft mascs”.

In typography, &Walsh continues the whimsical aesthetic suggested in the custom stickers. A fluid logotype is paired with the main brand colour “Lex Green” – again suggesting growth. The identity is supported by a wider palette of “spring tones”, says the release. While softness is prioritised across assets, &Walsh has also worked in some rougher textures via the custom stickers, which occasionally appear as hand-drawn paper cut outs.

As part of the project, &Walsh also delivers a UX/UI toolkit and a desktop and mobile website, introducing Lex’s main features and connecting users to the Apple App Store and Google Play for downloads. The studio worked with Lex users to inform the UX design, gathering feedback on accessibility and usage. Lex is launching new features such as group messaging to support its fresh positioning.