Lightyear One

During my first design internship at Hike One, I had the opportunity to contribute to an ambitious project called Lightyear One. Lightyear One is a Dutch startup developing the world’s first solar-powered electric car. They needed an app to accompany the car and turned to Hike One to bring that vision to life.

My task was to explore and define possible visual identities for the app. Which color schemes could capture the spirit of Lightyear? How should typography guide the user experience? Which elements should stay true to the existing brand, and where could we push boundaries and introduce something new?

I started by carefully reviewing the existing design guidelines and exploring their visual language. With my background in front-end development, I was also able to deep dive into their website and extract the details I needed to fully understand their design system.

Once I had a solid grasp of the design and assets, I started creating style tiles. This was a completely new concept for me at the time. A style tile is essentially a visual snapshot that captures different directions in color, typography, and overall mood, offering a quick impression of how a design might take shape.

As you can see, each card provides a quick snapshot of the color palette, typography, icons, and other design elements. I created several iterations, experimenting with different approaches such as filled versus outline icons, bold versus thin typography, and light versus dark themes. I designed many variations, but these were the most polished and fitting for the style exploration. Designing these tiles turned out to be a fun exercise.

The next step was to apply these styles to the UX wireframes provided by the designers. My goal was to create multiple iterations and explore just how many possibilities existed by experimenting with color, shadow, icons, backgrounds, and typography. Each variation revealed new opportunities for shaping the app’s look and feel.

For my final design exercise, I created a billboard-style mockup to showcase my visual explorations as if they were displayed in the real world. I experimented with typography, layout, and color, all drawn from the visual design directions I had developed earlier.

Light variants

Dark variants

In the end, I felt proud of my first work as a visual design intern. I learned an incredible amount in such a short time, thanks to the guidance of my mentor and the support of my colleagues.