Calorie tracking app concept
Muncha
A calorie tracker built around one number: what’s left for today.
Duration
2026
Role
Visual identity, UX/UI, strategy
Users
Everyday calorie counters
Status
Design concept
Because calorie apps turn logging lunch into a chore, people stop opening them, until..
The Real Problem
Calorie apps are good at maths and bad at being opened. MyFitnessPal can tell you almost anything about what you ate, but getting a meal into it means a search, a long list of near-identical entries, a serving size, and usually an ad or an upgrade prompt on the way.
Tracking only works if you do it every day, and an app that feels like admin is easy to skip. Miss two days and the habit tends to go with them.
So I set myself a brief: keep the features people rely on, and make the daily part quick enough that it stops feeling like homework.
Finding the Fix
I started with brainstorming on paper, listing everything a tracker has to do and asking which of those things someone actually needs at lunchtime on a Tuesday. Nearly every answer came back to one number: how many calories are left today.
That number became the centre of the app. The Today screen opens on a single ring showing what’s left (your goal, minus food, plus exercise). Macros, steps, water and fasting sit underneath for when you want them.
Logging got four ways in, so you can pick whatever suits the moment: scan a barcode, snap a photo of the plate, say what you ate, or type it. The photo scan lists what it found, and you can untick anything it got wrong before it goes in the diary.
For the look I wanted something clear, bold and clean that would stay easy to work with across a lot of screens. I worked through layouts in Figma, then used an AI workflow to build them out as a clickable prototype I could tap through end to end.
What Actually Happened
The first full pass gave me 17 working screens, from onboarding through the diary, progress, recipes, community and the Muncha+ upgrade. Clicking through them is where most of the real decisions got made.
Colour took the longest. I tried six themes, including a soft pastel, a midnight and aqua, and an Australian green and gold. Green and gold won because it felt local and warm, but my first version wasn’t legible enough. The teal sat too close to the main green, and both looked flat on a phone.
I brightened the gum leaf green, pushed the eucalypt teal further away from it, and kept to one rule: wattle gold only appears as a fill or on green, never as text on white. After that, every text pairing passed WCAG AA (white on green is 6.8:1, gold on green 4.6:1), and a contrast check across all 17 screens came back clean.
The brand mockups needed the same care. AI image tools draw convincing phones with nonsense on the screen, so every mockup uses real captures of the prototype. For the lifestyle photos, the phones were generated with a plain magenta screen and the real app was keyed in afterwards, which keeps fingers sitting on top of the display.
What Changed
By the end, Muncha was a brand as well as an app. The idea is “A bite, not a burden.” The logo is a gold circle with a bite taken out of it, which also reads as the plate, the day and the calorie ring. The voice is “like a mate who’s good at maths,” and the tagline is “Count less. Eat better.”
Around it sits a full kit: 14 guideline boards, six iPhone mockups, six App Store screenshots at Apple’s 1290 × 2796 size, a landing page and a set of launch videos.
The app itself changed the most. A barcode scan goes straight into the diary, a photo of a plate becomes a logged meal, and the Today screen answers the question people open a calorie app for before they’ve scrolled at all.
What I’d Do Differently
I’d put the prototype in front of other people much earlier. I tested every button myself, but I was the only one tapping, and someone who has given up on a calorie app before would have spotted friction I couldn’t.
I’d also design the less exciting screens sooner. Settings, reminders, dark mode and the rest of onboarding are still missing, and they’re a big part of what makes an app feel finished.
And I’d set the colour rules on day one. Fixing contrast after 17 screens existed meant another pass over every one of them, when a few rules at the start would have saved most of that work.
Most of the work was deciding what to leave off the screen. A calorie app can show you fifty numbers. Muncha leads with one and keeps the rest a tap away.
Seventeen screens built around one number to watch
