The task
There was no client and no brief here — it is a concept the agency made on its own initiative. The title page states it plainly: the design of a mobile application for a library and its space, inspired by the architecture of the Oodi library and modern web interfaces. The goal was to rethink and depict how such an app and its interactions might look in 2026.
What makes it interesting is the source material. Our reading was that a library app is usually solved as a catalogue — search, shelf, due date — so we took the building as the starting point instead. The reference, as the layouts record it, was the architecture of the Oodi library. An app that grows out of a building rather than out of a list of books is put together differently.
The solution
The visual language is assembled from two layers that rarely sit together. The first is an old serif: long quotations set large, as in a book, doubling as the background. The second is a dry interface sans in the cards, filters and captions.
A third layer works between them — handwritten strokes and brush marks laid over the screens. They return the trace of a hand to a digital interface.
Cards are cut out with a white outline, like stickers. That makes the screens read as a collage on a desk rather than a stack of blocks. The single bright colour is blue, and it appears where a shared activity begins.
What we did
Title screen. "Mobile library app design concept" set large, the team credits and the year, with a live brush stroke laid across it.
Author cards. A portrait, a name and a short note — Jane Austen tagged "magic, memory", Alexandre Dumas described as a French writer, playwright and journalist, one of the most widely read French authors and a master of the adventure novel. One format, different substance.
Author filter. A vertical list: ALL, AUSTEN, HEMINGWAY, FAULKNER, ORWELL, BLOCK, BULGAKOV. Navigation by name rather than by genre or popularity.
Quotation cards. A line from The Master and Margarita in two treatments — typeset on a light ground, and laid over Bulgakov's portrait. The same content as something to read and as something to share.
History and timeline. A History screen spanning 1934–2025, a NEW// marker and a strip of years along the bottom: 2012, 2018, 2019. A book's past shown as a timeline rather than a line in a description.
Profile. An RK/94 tile with a dot matrix and an EDIT control, plus member avatars.
Reading club. The club screen: 15 students, founded in 2022, 52 books read, an ACTIVE status and the period 2014 – now. An "Add a new book" control captioned "add a new book to your reading selection for the next month", with the avatars of everyone who already picked one.
The library as a space. A frame of Oodi captioned "by library Oodi", and a Period / Oodi switch — navigation through the building itself, not only through the books.
The result
A set of screens and artifacts that presents a library as a place rather than a catalogue: an author is a person with a biography, a quotation is an object, the building is part of the navigation, and reading is a shared activity with numbers and members attached.
The concept is published on Behance and on Dprofile, where it carries the Best of badge. Links below.
