- Role
- Founder, brand & product designer
- Client
- Self-initiated product
- Year
- 2026
- Tools
- Figma, React Native, Astro
Orage (French for “storm”) is a period tracker that turns your cycle into a sky. Every day has its own watercolor sky, every phase is a season, and your period is the storm. No charts, no pink, no account: everything stays on your phone. It's my own product, and I designed all of it, from the name and logo to the app, the landing page and the voice.
What if checking your cycle felt as calm, and as private, as checking the weather?
The goals
- 01Replace clinical charts and pink clichés with a language anyone can read at a glance: weather and seasons.
- 02Make it safe to glance at in public. A reminder about a storm reveals nothing on a lock screen.
- 03Collect nothing: no account, no analytics, no server, and no internet permission in the release build.
- 04Keep it gentle: no forced daily logging, no paywalls, no guilt.
- 05Ship everywhere, F-Droid included, with no Google libraries.
What I delivered
- Name, logo & brand identity
- Mobile app UX/UI
- Sky-based visual system
- Tone of voice (EN / FR)
- Landing page & blog
- branding
- logo design
- mobile app ux/ui
- landing page design
The brief
The challenges
- 1
How might we make a cycle readable at a glance, without a single chart?
- 2
How might we forecast something uncertain without promising a date we can't keep?
- 3
How might we earn the trust of people who've been burned by period apps selling their data?
How I got there
The process
- 1
Define
After ten years with a popular tracker, I changed phones and stopped before reinstalling it. I had no idea where a decade of my data had gone, and the app put a paywall in front of almost every action. Research backed the unease: in 2022, Mozilla put a privacy warning on 18 of the 25 period apps it reviewed. The brief wrote itself: a tracker that respects your body and your data, and that you actually enjoy opening. Designing brands is my job, so I started with the brand.
- 2
Design
- A weather language
- Your period is the storm. Each phase is a season: winter, spring, summer, autumn. The season is always the headline; clinical names only appear as small labels, for those who want them.
- A living sky
- 65 watercolor skies, one matched to each day of your cycle. When a storm runs late, the sky gets heavier, day after day, instead of shouting a number at you.
- A soft, airy identity
- A hand-drawn script wordmark with a sun and a cloud. Fraunces for display, Inter for the interface, and exactly one saturated color: the little orange sun dot. Even delete uses clay instead of red.
- Words that protect you
- Weather words only, never medical ones. “Storm likely tomorrow.” works on any lock screen, in any meeting, on any shared tablet.
- 3
Refine
Every round of testing on real devices removed something. The forecast range band greyed out most of the month, so it went. Mood chips, a 3/10-day switch and colorful tiles from the first mockups went too: no color on the Season screen except the sky. Forecast copy moved from a countdown to “Storm around Sunday.”, and a late storm is simply “running late”, never a count of days. Reduced motion, screen-reader labels and font scaling were checked along the way.
The work
Design highlights
Set up in three questions
When did your last storm start, how long did it last, how many days between storms? That's all Orage asks. Every question has a way out for real life (“I'm not sure of the exact day”, “It varies a lot”). There's no account to create.
Today, as a forecast
Home shows today's season and sky, a three-day forecast in weather words, and one tap to log a storm. The calendar colors each day by season and learns from your own history once you've logged three cycles. Season turns each phase into everyday advice: what to eat, how to move, how to plan your week.
A journal that lives in the present
Place today's sky like a polaroid, drag up to four moods into the circles, write a note in a handwritten font. Only today can be written, and pages lock once saved, because a journal records how you feel now. On days you'd rather not, “I don't feel journaling today” lets the page rest.
Painted skies
Soft sun, sunsets, rain clouds: 65 watercolor skies, one for every day of the cycle, and the same paintings carry the landing page. The sky replaces the chart: you know where you are in your cycle before you read a single word.
A landing page that keeps the app's promise
orage.app opens on a storm at sea, with a scroll-driven season dial that walks through a cycle and rain falling at the same angle as the paintings. The first version looked like a generic website, so I threw it away and rebuilt it product-first. It runs zero analytics and makes zero third-party requests: privacy before you've even downloaded the app.