Hinge
I joined Hinge as their Creative Director in 2020, during a period of rapid growth and profound uncertainty. I was tasked with building the company’s first in-house creative department.
Deleting Our Social
I did a lot at Hinge, but by far the most impactful decision I made was deleting all of our social media accounts. Sounds insane? It kind of was. A really talented group spent years building a social presence that 10X’d the competition in every possible metric. But leaving social allowed the team to focus more on metrics that mattered, like getting more people on more dates.
Brand Refresh
We took a critical look at who we were and radically shifted our visual identity. We moved from jewel tone colors that made the app feel like a slot machine to a muted, calm palette pulled directly from stones we picked up on the beach. We replaced hundreds of harsh vector illustrations with hand drawn humanity. Ultimately, we deprioritized ourselves and prioritized our daters.
Memes
I didn’t start Hinge’s meme strategy, but from day one I saw its power and successfully advocated to scale it. The strategy worked. It leveraged content partners with exceptional scale to put Hinge into the cultural narrative, instead of interrupting it. Hundreds of millions of likes and millions of reshares achieved without screaming a brand name into the void. Shout out to Kristina Mule, AKA the Meme Queen. Here are two of my favorite.
How We Do Things
Hinge is incredibly principle -driven. How We Do Things captures the core ideas that shape nearly everything at Hinge, from hiring and product decisions to teamwork and goal-setting. Shout out to Matt Jensen and Adam Delehanty for the excellent work on this.
Headspace X Hinge
It’s probably a good time to mention I joined Hinge during a global pandemic. Things were...tense. Especially for daters. We partnered with Headspace and created bespoke meditations for before and after a date. Shout out to the Comms & Partnership team for this one and to Matt Jensen for his illustrations.
Photo Library
With social distancing still very much a thing, it wasn't exactly easy capturing authentic moments of intimacy. But we did it. Thousands of images were created to feed an ever-expanding asset library for all our teams to use. A tremendous amount of praise goes to Andenew Ayele, who led this initiative. See more here
That's just a few of the many things I did while at Hinge. We created thousands of performance ads that consistently improved conversion. We optimized and refreshed App Store assets. We even hired a squadron of fighter jets to air-write slogans in the sky during lockdown. Heck, I even helped design their new office. It was a tremendously fun experience and I'm really grateful to have been able to work with such an incredible group of individuals who all, truly, madly, deeply, just wanted more people to find love.