Upgrading CAFU's icon system to 3D

CAFU was heading into 2.0, a full relaunch of the app and brand. I joined the Growth team in May 2023 with a mandate to find cheap, effective ways to support that growth, and one of the first things I picked up was creative output from CRM.

The visual language behind CAFU's core assets, the fuel truck, the Pilots, their bikes, was a flat vector style built two to three years earlier. Ageing against a brand about to relaunch was one problem. The bigger one was structural: there was no reusable system behind the illustrations. Every new campaign, app screen or format meant commissioning something new rather than adapting something that already existed, and every channel was drifting slightly out of sync with the others because nothing was actually shared between them.

Instead of treating this as an illustration refresh, I proposed building a 3D asset system: a single library of modelled assets that could be lit, staged and re-rendered for whatever surface needed them, rather than redrawn per channel.

Developing the style

I led the design and 3D modelling work with Marcus Matossian, with environment and animation from Abhishek Bhoite. We used Midjourney to test direction early, converging on simple, isometric staging with enough detail to hold up at large scale across web and paid media. That constraint, built once, used everywhere, shaped every style decision that followed.

From there we moved into detailed 3D modelling. The finished system is used across the app's service launcher, illustrating each of CAFU's offerings, and reused across paid media and web. The same modular assets extended into motion too: "Bring your vehicle outside" (animation: Abhishek Bhoite) reused the base models rather than starting from a blank scene.

Outcome

CAFU went from commissioning separate artwork per channel to shipping one asset system across three surfaces, app, paid media and web, that previously ran on disconnected production. A Pilot or a truck modelled once gets restaged for an ad, an app icon or a landing page instead of redrawn from scratch each time.