An AI-powered tool to help couples stay close with personalized nudges and insights into how their partner loves.
THE STORY
I woke up one morning with an idea I couldn't shake, and for the first time, AI tools existed to build it myself. For years, I'd seen relationships around me struggle, not from lack of love, but from the slow erosion of connection: missed date nights, unspoken needs, the small gestures that keep love alive, left undone.
I've always been fascinated by the frameworks that help us understand ourselves and others: love languages, attachment styles, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram. I'd read the books, take the tests, try to apply what I learned in my own relationship, and share insights with friends. It struck me how often we know what makes relationships thrive, but rarely get the gentle reminders to put it into practice.
So I started building. Not through work, not with a team. Just me, because AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor suddenly made it possible. The more I built, the more ideas emerged. Features that could weave relationship insights seamlessly into daily life. Personalized experiences shaped by location, love languages, attachment styles, even mood.
I approached it the way I approach any design system: by asking how technology could feel more human. Every interaction, from the Daily Flame to the Devotion Rings, was designed to feel less like an app and more like a quiet companion.
I worked on it before work and through weekends for six months, outside my full-time agency role. But the effort never felt like effort. It felt like building something that should exist. Something that could close the gap between what we know and what we feel.
TIMELINE
Design & Planning | April – July 2025
Development & Deployment | July – October 2025
WHY THIS MATTERS
Most relationships don’t fail from lack of love; they fade from lack of tending. Vesta is built for couples who want to keep the flame alive, and for anyone who believes connection is worth fighting for.
Onboarding
Vesta’s onboarding guides users through a series of reflective prompts to uncover how they love and connect. Users share key details such as relationship duration, location, love language, and attachment style. These inputs shape every experience that follows.
RELATIONSHIP CONTEXT
Vesta adjusts its tone and content based on the couple’s relationship duration and living dynamic, recognizing that a 6-month relationship and a 6-year one require different forms of support.
LOCATION
Enables contextual nudges and local suggestions.
EMOTIONAL FRAMEWORKS
Love language defines how affection is best expressed and received, while attachment style reveals how each person relates to closeness and independence. These shape Vesta’s tone, timing, and the kinds of nudges and prompts each user receives.
Daily Flame + Notifications
A simple daily check-in that turns awareness into thoughtful actions with ember alerts tailored to each user’s relationship
Connection Compass
A guide to how your partner loves, helping you deepen your relationship with intention.
Spark some Romance
Smart suggestions tailored to your time and place, helping shake things up and make time together more memorable.
Wisdom for Love
A companion that listens, remembers, and helps you deepen your connection with care.
Juno speaks as a third presence in the relationship: calm, curious, and attuned. Through deliberate prompt engineering, it uses fire as its central metaphor to reinforce the brand verbally. Rather than prescriptive solutions, Juno asks reflective questions and speaks poetically yet accessibly in lowercase text, creating conversations that feel less like app advice and more like journaling with a trusted confidant.
Brand System
Vesta draws from Roman mythology to create a cohesive world where tending relationships becomes a sacred ritual. Every element, from app name to navigation, carries symbolic meaning rooted in ancient wisdom.
Guiding Personas
To guide my design decisions, I developed three personas representing different relationship challenges: new couples who struggle to express needs (Elyse), established partners drowning in busy schedules (Matthew), and long-term couples seeking sustainable growth tools (Ericka & Ben). These profiles shaped everything from Vesta's gentle tone to its calendar integration.
I was Inspired by classical murals in the Louvre and Roman sculptures of gods and goddesses, delicate serif typography, and fire-like gradients to express love as both timeless and luminous.
I customized logotype to overlap the e–s and t–a. A subtle adjustment to make the letters feel close and connected.
The warm reds and golds balance by the cool blues to convey both passion and calm.
Custom CSS gradient meshes bring a modern sense of light and warmth. Inspired by flames, designed to feel calm, fluid, and alive within the app experience.
Bulgari, inspired by Roman engravings, brings a sense of timeless reverence, paired with Inter’s modern clarity to balance warmth with clarity.
REFLECTION
Vesta is the culmination of years spent designing systems that bridge logic and emotion.
At agencies, I’ve helped brands craft stories that connect people to ideas. With Vesta, I wanted to design something that connects people.
Building it solo, with AI as my collaborator, pushed me to think not just as a designer, but as a systems thinker, strategist, and developer. It reminded me why I design: to make empathy scalable, to turn intention into action, and to build tools that help love last.