Not Even WhatsApp

Privacy and security sit at the core of WhatsApp, and this project set out to translate encryption into a visual language without relying on raw, technically literal depictions, building expressions that could scale and still be universally associated with protection. The task was to build a system capable of communicating privacy clearly and consistently, answering questions like: what should an encrypted image look like? How can a line of text lose its meaning without losing its form? And what’s the visual equivalent of a voice message under encryption?

The response combined brand guidelines, audience insights, and continuous experimentation. Different ways of distorting, fragmenting, and reorganizing media were tested until we arrived at a visual grammar consistent across text, image, audio, and video. Beyond static expressions, the project also explored motion to embody the act of encryption and decryption — making visible the process of locking and unlocking data.

This system was formalized into an encryption framework: a set of guidelines and working files that define everything from acceptable levels of randomness in meaningless character sequences to rules ensuring consistent representations of protected content across different scales. The result is a visual infrastructure that makes trust tangible in what remains invisible to the user. In the end, teams around the world were equipped with tools to create, expand, and apply this language consistently across every point of contact between WhatsApp and its audience.