When I started building Vladers, I already had a fairly clear idea of how I wanted it to feel.
I didn't want it to look like a generic football app.
I wanted something with its own identity — something that could feel clean and collectible-focused for one player, but more energetic and game-like for another.
That idea slowly became the visual language Vladers uses today: deep blues, neon accents, animated elements, collectible cards and an interface that tries to sit somewhere between a football collection and a mobile game.
And because players don't all want the same experience, part of that identity is customizable.
You can lean more toward the collectible side of Vladers or embrace the more gaming-focused atmosphere built around challenges and progression.
The goal was never just to make individual screens look nice.
It was to make everything feel like it belonged to the same world.
Almost 200 Cards — And None of Them Felt Simple
The collectible cards became one of the biggest design projects inside Vladers.
There are now around 200 of them.
They are built around four main card templates and five rarity levels, starting at Bronze and going all the way up to Elite.
On paper, that sounds like a fairly straightforward system.
Create four templates, change a few colours for each rarity and start producing cards.
In reality, it became much more complicated.
Every rarity needed to feel more valuable than the one before it without becoming visually disconnected from the rest of the collection.
Every template needed its own personality.
And every individual player still had to sit naturally inside that system.
A border that was slightly wrong could ruin the balance of a card.
A background could be too strong.
A lighting effect could hide the player.
A pattern could suddenly look completely different after one small AI-generated variation.
Those little things sometimes took hours to fix.
From the First AI Experiments to a Real Design Process
The first cards were created through a lot of experimentation with ChatGPT and other AI tools.
At the beginning, producing the visual result I had in my head was extremely slow.
I could spend an entire evening on a single design.
Over time, I started building a much more structured workflow around the cards, including internal tools to reproduce and manage them more efficiently.
Later, I also started using OpenAI tools to get closer to specific patterns, details and compositions that I already knew I wanted.
That changed the speed of the process enormously.
But faster does not mean automatic.
AI can get very close to the result you want and then introduce one tiny mistake.
And sometimes that tiny mistake becomes the thing you spend the next two hours trying to remove.
The process gradually became less about asking AI to invent something for me and more about directing it toward an increasingly precise visual system.
Today, I can create a strong starting point much faster than I could at the beginning.
The last few percent are still usually where most of the work happens.
Making Digital Cards Feel Physical
Once the cards themselves started looking right, another question appeared:
How do you make a digital collectible actually feel collectible?
One answer was the way the cards react inside the app.
The final versions use a foil-like shine effect that moves across the card and changes the way it feels on screen.
It is a small visual detail, but for me it makes a huge difference.
Instead of looking like a static image inside an interface, the card starts to feel closer to an object.
Something you found.
Something you own.
Something you might want to look at again.
That effect is especially important as the rarities increase.
A rare card should not only have a different label attached to it.
It should feel different when it appears.
There are also a few special cards hidden in another part of the app — including the charity section — but I would rather leave those for people to discover themselves.
Opening a Pack Should Feel Like an Event
The cards are only one half of collecting.
The other half is the moment you discover them.
I didn't want opening a pack in Vladers to feel like pressing a button and immediately receiving a list of items.
There needed to be some anticipation.
So the pack-opening experience became its own small piece of design.
Animation, timing, sound, music and the reveal itself all work together to make receiving a new card feel more important.
This is one of those parts of the app where relatively small details have a surprisingly large effect.
A reveal that happens too quickly feels meaningless.
One that takes too long becomes annoying.
The music needs to create atmosphere without becoming repetitive.
And the visual effects need to support the card rather than overpower it.
Finding that balance took a lot of experimentation.
Music Became Part of the Identity Too
Music was never supposed to be one of the biggest features in Vladers.
But once I started adding it, I realised how much it changed the atmosphere of the app.
I used a combination of AI-assisted discovery and music from sources offering tracks that could be used in the project.
Some tracks immediately worked.
Others felt too much like traditional football content and had to be replaced or reconsidered as Vladers developed its own personality.
The ones that remain now feel much more connected to the world of the app.
The same applies to sound effects.
They are small individually, but together they help make opening a pack, navigating the interface or playing a match feel much more alive.
Then the Mini-Game Started Growing
The game inside Vladers started from something extremely simple.
There was a pitch.
There were one or two actions.
And that was basically it.
But once I started playing it, I kept seeing places where the experience could become better.
So the small prototype gradually turned into a proper mini-game.
Music was added.
Then sound effects.
Then visual feedback.
Then clearer rules.
Then better transitions.
Then dedicated start and result screens.
And, naturally, more game mechanics followed.
What I wanted to preserve throughout all of this was simplicity.
I don't think someone should need to be a gamer to understand how to play Vladers.
The controls and rules should be clear enough that a person can enter a match, understand what is happening and enjoy it without needing a long tutorial.
At the same time, there should be enough happening underneath to make another round tempting.
From testing it with friends — and from the amount I end up playing it myself — I think that balance is getting there.
Possibly a little too well in my case :D.
Designing the Screens Around the Game
The screens before and after a match became just as important as the match itself.
Before playing, the start screen needs to explain what the player is supposed to do without feeling like a manual.
Afterwards, the result needs to be immediately understandable.
What happened?
Did I win?
What did I earn?
What can I do next?
These seem like obvious questions, but answering them clearly through design makes an enormous difference to how smooth the experience feels.
The goal was to remove friction between rounds.
If someone wants to play again, they should be able to.
If they want to move back into collecting or challenges, that should feel natural too.
One Product Instead of a Collection of Features
That has probably been the biggest design challenge with Vladers overall.
There are a lot of individual parts now.
The interface.
Themes.
Collectible cards.
Different rarities.
Foil effects.
Packs.
Music.
Sound effects.
Challenges.
Progression.
And the mini-game itself.
It would have been very easy for them to feel like separate experiments living inside the same application.
The part I am happiest with today is that they increasingly don't.
The cards feel like they belong inside the interface.
The pack opening leads naturally into collecting.
The collection has a purpose inside the game.
The game connects back into rewards and progression.
And the same visual identity follows the player through all of it.
A Game I Wanted to Keep in My Pocket
When I think about what I originally wanted Vladers to become, it was actually pretty simple.
I wanted to make a small app that I would enjoy keeping on my phone.
Something I could open for a few minutes.
Collect something.
Play a match.
Complete a challenge.
Discover something new.
And then come back to later.
After all the design work, failed experiments, AI generations, tiny corrections, sound choices, animations and iterations that went into it, I genuinely feel that I have succeeded in creating that experience.
There is still plenty I want to improve.
Vladers is still evolving.
But the identity I had in my head when I started is no longer just an idea.
It is finally something I can open on my phone and use.
And for me, that is probably the most satisfying part of designing it.
Discover Vladers
If you're reading this as part of the Shipaton Design Awards, I hope you spend a little time exploring it rather than only looking at screenshots.
Open a pack.
Move through the collection.
Look at the different rarities.
Try the game.
Turn the music on.
And maybe look around for some of the cards I haven't shown here.
A lot of the work in Vladers lives in those small details.
I hope you enjoy discovering them.