Mother Design Brings Spirituality To Life With Purple Garden's New Identity

Independent branding and design studio Mother Design, part of the Mother Family, has created a new identity for Purple Garden, the mobile and online psychic services platform, designed to bring the sensorial experience of spiritual practice to the digital world. The new brand reframes Purple Garden from a place to get a one-off reading into a place for ongoing spiritual practice, built around a simple insight: some questions keep returning as life changes.

The spiritual services industry is worth around $2.3 billion, with digital platforms opening up new ways for people to connect with spiritual guidance. For Purple Garden, the opportunity was to bring more of the atmosphere, ritual and sense of energy associated with spiritual practice into the digital experience, creating a brand world that feels as intuitive, immersive and emotionally engaging as the services it offers.

Mother Design’s challenge was to make that experience felt again, in order to establish Purple Garden's position as the leader in the category, creating a digital identity that could tap into the sense of connection, uplift and even transcendence Purple Garden’s audience already associates with spiritual practice.

Built for an audience of ‘Believers of the Bigger Picture’, the identity positions Purple Garden as a spiritual hub for seasoned seekers looking for growth and meaning amid the messy reality of life. The creative idea, ‘A Living Practice', aims to move the experience beyond passive advice towards active clarity through repetition and growth. The new identity establishes Purple Garden as a leading destination for deeper spiritual experiences.

To create an identity rooted in intuition rather than simply representing it, Mother Design deliberately introduced spontaneity and physical experimentation into its own design process.

The project began with a séance and chakra reading led by a Purple Garden holistic practitioner. As part of Mother Design’s Wild Card initiative, which encourages experimentation with unfamiliar disciplines and practices, the practitioner led the team through an automatic drawing and writing workshop. Working instinctively with paper and charcoal, the designers sought to bypass conscious thought, with the resulting forms, textures and feelings becoming a creative foundation for the identity.

The work follows Mother Design’s recently launched rebrand of Keen, another spiritual guidance brand within the Ingenio portfolio. While Keen was repositioned to broaden the appeal of spiritual guidance to a more mainstream and spiritually curious audience, Purple Garden is aimed at seasoned spiritual seekers already incorporating these services into their wider wellbeing routines. The distinct identities give each brand a clearly differentiated role within the portfolio.

Ariana Hellebuyck, CMO, Ingenio, said: “Purple Garden is for people who already have a deep connection with spirituality and see it as an active part of how they navigate their lives. We wanted the brand to reflect the depth of the experiences our guides provide and make that connection feel just as powerful in a digital environment.

“Mother Design has created something that feels distinctive to Purple Garden and true to our audience, while giving us a richer and more immersive platform for the next stage of the brand.”

Joanna Tulej, Creative Director, Mother Design, said: “So much of spiritual practice is about things you feel rather than things you can see – energy, intuition, connection and those moments when you feel altered somehow. The challenge was how you translate that into a brand experience without falling back on the visual clichés of the category.

“We realised that if we wanted the identity to feel spontaneous and alive, we needed to allow some of that spontaneity into the way we designed it too. Starting with the séance and automatic drawing session gave us permission to step away from the screen and the rational design process. Some of the textures, energy and unexpectedness that came out of that experience found their way into the final identity.”

The work spans brand positioning, visual and verbal identity, typography, imagery, photography, iconography, motion and digital experience, and is rolling out across Purple Garden’s website, app (in stages), advertising and social channels.

Behind the design: capturing creative intuition

The creative approach was partly inspired by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and The Five, the collective of women who experimented with trance states and automatic drawing to set aside conscious thought and allow images and words to emerge freely.

That spirit of experimentation continued as the work moved onto screen. During design development, Mother Design moved back and forth between traditional design programs and AI tools, using constant iteration to generate unexpected visual treatments and introduce further unpredictability into the process.

Leaving an impression on the screen

Typographic details have been crafted to continue this feeling of aliveness within the product. The wordmark balances the modern with the whimsical, combining elongated serifs and curved junctures that appear to grow outwards. A digital-first, crystal-like glyph reinforces Purple Garden’s role as a source of grounded guidance and forms the basis of an icon system for navigating the platform’s services. Literatura Present and ABC Social complete the typographic system, with Literatura's flowing descenders and serifs adding to the feeling of aliveness and growth. ABC Social balances this as a functional sans for ease in digital applications.

An expressive typography element, taking inspiration from cymatic patterns, shows enlarged words appearing to bleed off the screen. This ‘living type’ serves to represent continual growth, in the way a certain word or phrase from a practitioner sticks with you and helps you to evolve as a result of their advice.

Evoking spiritual energies

Imagery brings a more tactile quality to the experience. A series of ‘charged objects’ images represent services such as dream analysis and psychic readings, using solarised glows and flame-like ripples to suggest the energy exchanged between practitioner and customer. Photography moves between intimate moments of physical sensation and vast landscapes and natural textures, filtered through the brand purples to evoke an altered reality.

Purple sits at the centre of a rich, multi-tonal world of texture, movement and deep colour. Both a link to the brand name and its associations with intuition and higher consciousness, Mother Design developed a palette of six warmer purple shades, moving away from the blue-toned digital purples common within the category and allowing the identity to flex across different moods and moments.

Conversations with Purple Garden’s guides have also informed the design system, balancing rigour with rhythm. The organic, layered layouts have a loose, dreamlike quality that reflects the often intuitive and emotional experience of seeking spiritual guidance, where thoughts and feelings aren't always clearly defined. Motion similarly guides discovery through the app, with elements responding to one another to create a sense of interconnection and growth.

The verbal identity introduces the persona ‘Your Seasoned Guide’: warm rather than distant, experienced without being intimidating, and supportive rather than prescriptive. Language encourages users to notice patterns and reflect, with lines including ‘Notice what repeats’ and ‘Tend to what is growing within you’.