Brothr 79

Brothers of Lambda Sigma Upsilon Latino Fraternity Incorporated had no official platform for connecting and networking with one another. Communication happened in GroupMe and Facebook Groups — tools built for general audiences, not for a brotherhood with specific goals around community, professional development, and cultural identity.

Brothr 79 was built to change that. A platform designed specifically for the fraternity: connecting brothers across chapters, giving alumni continued purpose and career guidance, and aligning with the organization's four core goals.

I started the design process with an immersive brand research sprint: pulling from over 80 photos that were categorized, clustered, and synthesized into four directional mood boards — Dark Ocean, Dark Sky, Light Ocean, and Light Sky — all inspired by the visual language of the organization.

From there I developed a circular color grid: a quadrant-based system that showed how all four color directions could relate to each other, giving stakeholders and the team a clear picture of the full design space before committing to a direction.

To manage the complexity of the full app — onboarding, dashboard, profile, messaging, search, support — I built a modular design system based on reusable components: cards, nibs, list items, and controls, each with their own states. The system allowed for flexibility in combining components while ensuring visual consistency and recognizable patterns for users.

The most requested feature was a search engine that let brothers find each other based on specific needs: not just name lookup, but discovery by interest, career, background, and personal identity — Dominican, Irish, mechanical engineer, comic books, whatever mattered in context.

Through in-depth conversations with brothers, we identified the unique connection points within the brotherhood. The design solution was a one-tap tag system that let brothers edit their discoverability profile — skills, passions, location, career — enabling personalized discovery without requiring any complex filtering UI.

What This Project Built

Brothr 79 was where I developed the design muscles I've used in every project since: building a design system from scratch, conducting brand research with real stakeholders, designing for community dynamics rather than just task completion, and sustaining a product vision across a multi-year, volunteer-driven build.