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TallyToo

Rebrand · my own Android app, live on Google Play

The app already looked like a notebook. Everything around it didn't. This is how the look was found inside the app and taken outside: to the icon, the store and the site.

Role
Solo, start to finish
Scope
Identity, icon, Play listing, web
Built in
Illustrator, Figma
Status
Live on Google Play, Nov 2026
Before and after: the old TallyToo icon, four smooth gradient bars and a yellow slash, with a level hand-drawn arrow across to the new icon, the same tally mark drawn by hand with hatched bars on grid paper

The look inside

The app already had a look

TallyToo counts anything, on your own or shared, so everyone adds to the same number. It has been on Google Play since May 2026.

702total installs on Google Play
155monthly active users, on average

Play Console, 11 October to 7 November 2026.

Open it and it looks like a notebook: grid paper, card outlines that wobble like a pen line, progress bars filled with hatching, and Gaegu, a handwritten font, for every word.

The brand was already there. It just hadn't left the app.

The TallyToo home screen on grid paper: tally cards with wobbly outlines in green, orange, red and violet for Smoke-free days 57, Pantry jars 23 of 40 with a hatched progress bar, Family push-ups 830 reps and Verses read 41, each with its quick-add buttons
A single tally, No-spend days, at 22 of 30 days, with a hatched yellow progress bar at 73 percent and a line graph of the month climbing to the goal
A shared tally, Family push-ups, shared with three people listed with their roles, owner and editors, at 830 reps with a rising line graph

The look outside

Everything around it had drifted

The icon was smooth bars with subtle gradients and a yellow slash, with nothing hand-drawn about it. The store screenshots each used a different layout. There was no wordmark, no palette and no type system, and the product was described a different way in every place it appeared:

  • WebsiteTrack anything that counts
  • WebsiteA simple, elegant app
  • Play titleTallyToo - Tally Together
  • InstagramTally Anything That Counts. Tally Together.
The Google Play listing before the rebrand: TallyToo - Tally Together, 500+ downloads, the old icon with four smooth gradient bars and a yellow slash, and five screenshots with different headline styles
Before: the Play listing, November 2026.
The old TallyToo icon: four smooth bars with subtle gradients in pink, orange, green and blue, crossed by a thick yellow slash, on white
Before: the icon.

Four decisions

Bring the inside out

Each decision started as a direction board, with the options side by side.

Decision #1 · The mark

Keep the tally, or start again?

  • The same mark, hand-drawn
  • Ink on paper
  • The tally card

I kept the old mark so it stays familiar to people already using the app. Changing it too much could leave them disoriented.

Direction board: three ways to redraw the tally mark. A, the same four colours and yellow slash as hatched bars on grid paper, picked; B, four ink strokes with a blue slash; C, a tally card with a plus button
Decision #2 · The type

A new display face, or Gaegu?

  • Gaegu Bold, set tighter
  • Shantell Sans
  • Kalam
  • Grandstander

Gaegu is the app's own voice, so it stays for the wordmark and headlines too. Set as it comes, its letters sit loose, so the wordmark is set tighter.

Direction board: the TallyToo wordmark, a headline and a tally card set in four faces: Gaegu Bold, picked, Shantell Sans ExtraBold, Kalam Bold and Grandstander ExtraBold
Decision #3 · The colour

Whose colour is it?

  • One blue, the default tally colour
  • Paper, ink and one green

In the app, the person counting picks every tally's colour. So the brand keeps only the notebook (paper, grid and ink) and one green from the old banner. Every other colour is theirs.

Colour board: Tally green #33A770, Deep green #1E7A52 and Mint wash #E7F4EE, the paper, grid and ink of the app in light and dark, and the seven tally colours as hatched bars
Colour: paper, ink and one green. The rest is yours.
Decision #4 · The line

One line, everywhere

  • Tally together.
  • Everyone on the same number.
  • You count. They count too.

It's been the line from the start, because it's why the app exists: to tally things together with other people.

Direction board: three candidate lines, each with a Play short description and its character count: Tally together., picked; Everyone on the same number.; You count. They count too.

Drawing it

Built step by step

The icon needed to reflect the app's look. That meant roughened lines for a hand-drawn feel. No straight or clean lines, except the faint grid behind. The shapes and lines stay editable, so it can still be adjusted.

The mark's build, step by step, animated from the shapes and effects in the master file.
The new TallyToo icon: four hand-drawn bars in pink, orange, green and blue, filled with diagonal hatching, crossed by a wavy yellow slash with a darker edge, on grid paper
After: the icon, on the app's grid paper.
The new icon on a mock-up phone home screen among grey placeholder apps, labelled TallyToo; beside it the icon at 144, 72 and 48 pixels, and cropped to a circle and a squircle
Working small: on a home screen (mock-up), at launcher sizes and in launcher shapes.

The wordmark is Gaegu Bold with tracking at −20 and optical kerning. The two l's sat furthest apart, so the space after each l is tightened to −55.

TallyToo set twice in Gaegu Bold: above, in grey, as the font sets it, with a wide gap marked between the two l's; below, in ink, the final wordmark with tracking at minus 20 and minus 55 after each l, the same gap marked and much narrower
Above, as the font sets it. Below, the final wordmark.

The system

Four bars and a slash

The icon, the lockup, the mark on its own and the wordmark, in ink and in white on Deep green, with the four brand colours and the seven tally colours.

The TallyToo system on grid paper: the app icon, the horizontal lockup of icon and wordmark, the mark alone, the wordmark in ink and in white on Deep green, then the four brand colours (Tally green, Deep green, Mint wash, ink) and the seven tally colours

Out into the world

The store and the site

A headline, a real screen and the grid paper behind it, the same way on all seven store screenshots.

The new Play feature graphic: the TallyToo wordmark in ink and the line Tally anything, together, on grid paper, over a green line chart that climbs from left to right
The Play feature graphic.
Play store screenshot 1. Tally together: the tally list on grid paper, with smoke-free days, rows knitted, family push-ups and water
Play store screenshot 2. Everyone adds to the same count: a shared Family push-ups tally with three members and a weekly progress chart
Play store screenshot 3. Your tally, your way: the Create Tally screen with units, targets, preset amounts and a celebration message
Play store screenshot 4. See patterns and progress unfold: weekly and monthly entry dots and a list of streaks
Play store screenshot 5. Right on your home screen: two TallyToo widgets on an Android home screen, counting with one tap
Play store screenshot 6. Dark mode: the tally list in dark, easy on the eyes at night
Play store screenshot 7. And themes: the tally list in a warm light theme and the default theme side by side
The refreshed tallytoo.vercel.app: the icon and hand-drawn wordmark in the nav, the headline Tally together over grid paper that fades to white, the Google Play button, and the app's tally list beside it
The Google Play listing after the rebrand: TallyToo - Tally Together, the new hand-drawn icon on grid paper, and the new store screenshots, each with a handwritten headline on grid paper
After: the live Play listing, November 2026.

What's next

Back inside the app

The new icon went into the app in the same update as the store listing. Android crops launcher icons to its own shapes, so on the home screen the mark sits smaller, inside the safe area, on its own layer of grid paper. New tallies still start blue; changing that to Tally green comes next.

Full disclosure: the first release was built in a rush. The effort went into the app itself, and much less into the branding and the store. Coming back to them, I saw how disconnected they were. Every time I opened the app from my phone, I thought the icon really didn't identify with it.

What I learned is the power of cohesion. I didn't need to reinvent the brand, only to look at what the app already used - its fonts, its hand-drawn style - and carry that out to the icon and the store. Having those rules to refer back to made each decision quicker, with far less wandering.

The TallyToo identity and app, brought together.