KOIpid Challenge - Help Koi the Fish find love

For Valentine’s Day, Koi Security (acquired by Palo Alto Networks) launched a creative challenge: help their mascot, Koi the Fish, find love.

The brief invited participants to create something smart, funny, and product-driven - a concept that could merge cybersecurity with the familiar language of dating apps. The challenge was intentionally open, which made it an opportunity not just for a visual joke, but for a deeper product and brand reinterpretation.

My response was a playful concept that imagined dating-app logic as a native layer inside Koi’s product experience. Rather than creating a standalone campaign, I designed a fictional feature system that translated real cybersecurity concepts into relationship language, making the product feel instantly more human, engaging, and memorable.

The result was a concept that felt humorous on the surface, but grounded in the platform’s real product logic. The project ultimately won the competition, earning me a two-night stay at Six Senses Shaharut 😄

Koi Security helps organizations secure every software install across their endpoints. It provides visibility into both binary and non-binary software, evaluates risk in real time, and lets teams govern, approve, block, and remediate risky packages, extensions, AI tools, and other marketplace-delivered software.

The challenge was to reinterpret this relatively technical and operational system through the playful lens of dating culture, while still remaining true to the product.

That required balancing several things at once. The concept had to be:

• Clever and funny
• Aligned with Koi’s existing brand and product
• Detailed enough to feel believable
• Playful without becoming disconnected from the actual platform

In other words, the challenge was not simply to create a joke. It was to create a concept that felt like something Koi itself might have built - a playful layer that still respected the mechanics and meaning of the real product.

The project began with a simple strategic insight: both dating apps and cybersecurity platforms are built around the same core question.

Can this relationship be trusted?

Dating apps help people evaluate compatibility

Cybersecurity platforms help organizations evaluate reliability

That insight shaped the entire concept.

Rather than building a campaign around Valentine’s Day from the outside, I approached the project as if I were extending Koi’s actual product from the inside. The goal was to create something that felt native to the platform, while reframing its logic in a way that was playful, surprising, and instantly understandable.

Three principles guided the work:

Koi already has a distinctive visual style. Instead of the dark, generic look common in cybersecurity, its brand feels playful, illustrated, and highly expressive. Cream backgrounds, warm reds and yellows, purple-blue accents, rounded UI elements, and the recurring presence of Koi the Fish create a world that feels both friendly and memorable.

Because of that, KOIpid needed to feel like a natural extension of Koi’s existing ecosystem. The goal was not to invent a new style, but to reinterpret Koi’s visual language through the lens of dating apps - keeping the same colors, illustration style, and playful product storytelling, while adapting them to a more romantic and humorous theme.

The name KOIpid was created by the Koi team as part of the Valentine’s Day challenge. It combines Koi, the company’s fish mascot, with a playful reference to OkCupid, immediately signaling the concept: a matchmaking system for software.

I designed a logo featuring Koi the Fish wearing heart-shaped glasses, referencing Valentine’s Day and the idea of “seeing” compatibility. The wings symbolize Koi’s role in helping organizations find trustworthy software partners. The typography uses rounded letterforms inspired by OkCupid, while the heart-shaped dot above the “i” reinforces the romantic theme.

The color approach stayed intentionally close to Koi’s existing product and brand language. Because the concept depended on believability, I avoided introducing an entirely separate Valentine-themed palette. Instead, I worked within the logic of Koi’s interface and visual identity, adding romantic and playful cues through messaging, labels, illustrations, and interactions rather than relying on decorative color changes alone.

This helped the concept feel native to the dashboard rather than layered on top of it. The humor came from the reinterpretation of the system, not from breaking the visual language.

That restraint was part of what made the project work: the product still looked credible, even when it was speaking in the language of love.

This language system gave the concept a recognizable voice and made the experience feel coherent across every touchpoint. The joke wasn’t confined to a single headline - it was embedded across naming, structure, interface copy, categorization, and narrative. It even extended to Charlie, Koi’s office dog, who appeared as a perfectly secure “Dreamy” example.

That consistency helped KOIpid feel like more than a campaign. It felt like a miniature brand world built on top of a real product.

The concept imagined a “Love Mode” inside the Koi dashboard - a playful interface layer that translated the platform’s real security logic into the language of relationships and dating apps. The goal was to make the concept feel so coherent and detailed that it could almost pass as a real feature announcement.

The final experience was designed as a narrative landing page that moved through a clear sequence:

Koi the Fish is single

The system is broken

Introducing KOIpid

Feature breakdown

Social features

Thank you!

This structure allowed the concept to move naturally from humor into product logic and then into broader campaign participation.

TSeveral product interactions helped bring the idea to life. For example, a Love Column was added to the inventory table, translating risk scores into relationship labels. This small interface change made complex security signals feel instantly more human and readable, while still preserving the underlying product logic. Another example is the scan activity that became a Dating History, turning trust evaluation into a sequence of ongoing “dates” between KOI and its potential partners.

Each of these ideas added playfulness, but all remained anchored to real product behavior. That balance was central to the concept.

A broader social layer extended the concept beyond the dashboard itself, turning KOIpid into something more participatory and shareable. Rather than ending with the product interface, the idea expanded into a small campaign ecosystem that invited teams to engage with the concept publicly and emotionally, while still reinforcing KOI’s core themes of trust, reputation, and secure software use.

Love Letters

A playful generator that lets teams write public love letters to the tools they trust most. This turns security appreciation into a shareable format, giving teams a lighthearted way to celebrate software that consistently behaves well and earns their trust.

Secure Love Pond

A public showcase for tools that are repeatedly marked as Dreamy. It acts as a playful version of a reputation system, highlighting software with strong security signals and making trust feel visible, social, and memorable.

Embed Your Koi

A badge that organizations can place on their websites to show their commitment to secure, governed software use. It works as both a trust signal and a branded extension of the campaign, helping the concept live beyond KOI’s own platform.

KOIpid worked because it did more than make a joke - it translated a real cybersecurity product into a more human language without losing the integrity of the underlying system.

What made the project successful was that it balanced multiple layers at once: humor and precision, playfulness and credibility, campaign storytelling and product thinking.

It also went beyond the screen. To make the idea feel real, I purchased koipid.com, published a love letter to the Koi team, and extended the concept into my LinkedIn visuals. That extra layer of commitment helped turn the project from a design submission into something people could actually interact with.

At its core, KOIpid was a reminder that good security, like good relationships, is ultimately about trust.

Full work: https://www.koi.ai/hall-of-fame/koipid-challenge

Announcement: LinkedIn