Case study · Mobile app

MONA AI: your face, 500+ styles

An AI photo and video studio: upload a selfie, pick a style, get a portrait, a headshot or a short video. We designed the whole app end to end, including the motion.

Client
Horus Studios
Our role
End-to-end UI/UX design and motion
Platform
iOS
Status
On the App Store since April 2026
Explore screen: a featured style carousel above a grid of style cards such as Birthday Glam, Professional Photoshoot, Street Soul and YOUphoria.
Explore: styles first, one tap to try.
Paywall: Create your first AI photos today, with a first-week offer and what premium includes.
A paywall that sells the first result.
Profile screen with a Create more with Premium card showing weekly credits.
Credits and premium, kept in plain words.

The problem

The idea was simple to say: start from your own picture and turn it into images and videos. Portraits of you, shots with your friends, couple photos, animated scenes.

The hard part was making that range feel simple. An AI photo app lives or dies on one loop: hand over a selfie, get back something you want to share. Every step that slows the loop, or produces a result that doesn't look like you, costs a user.

What we did

  • Styles first. The explore screen leads with what you could become, not with settings: a featured carousel, then style cards, each one tap from trying it.
  • Guidance before upload. Photo guidelines show good and bad photos side by side before you choose one, because a better input is the cheapest way to a better result.
  • Photo and video in one place, with results saved to My Media, ready to share, recreate or edit.
  • A paywall that sells the first result, and a premium card that explains credits in plain words.
  • Motion for the brand. An animated splash where golden shards assemble into the MONA logo.

Where AI helped

  • Kling AI for the splash. Image-to-video from the real logo file, so the final frame is exactly the MONA mark, with the motion directed in a written prompt.
  • A coded animation for the app. The logo transformation was also delivered as a ready React Native component, so developers could drop it in instead of rebuilding it from a video.

See how this works on every project: how we design with AI.

What came out of it

MONA AI launched on the App Store in April 2026 and has kept shipping since.

5.0

App Store rating, from 27 ratings (Turkey store, October 2026)

8

releases between April and October 2026, up to version 3.0

500+

styles across photo and video

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Senior design, sped up by AI, decided by people.