Toloka

Role
Design direction, design lead
Context

Toloka (from Belarusian, meaning "joint work for a common cause") is a crowdsourcing platform launched to quickly mark up large amounts of data, later used for machine learning and improving search algorithms. Initially built inside Yandex's ecosystem, by 2020 it had become a marketplace connecting AI companies with performers all over the world.

Concept

The primary visual metaphor chosen was a fractal — a complex structure consisting of simple, repeating elements. This choice reflects the functioning of the crowdsourcing platform, where elementary actions, repeated many times, lead to complex results.

Toloka — fractals
Toloka — case still

Audiences

The company has two target audiences — B2B and B2C — with different interaction mechanics, so two distinct visual systems were created.

B2B includes data scientists, ML engineers and ML teams at large technology companies working in computer vision, speech and search technologies that don't have their own crowdsourcing platform.

B2C consists of performers, or "tolokers". As of July 2020 the platform had more than 8 million registered performers — mostly people aged 18 to 65, living in different countries and speaking various languages, who come to the platform to earn money.

Toloka — case still
Toloka — case still
Toloka — illustration 1Toloka — illustration 2
Toloka — case still

Logo

The logo reflects the core idea of the identity — a complex object made up of simple elements. The old Toloka logo resembled a chamomile; we kept a sense of continuity while making the mark more recognisable and concise, and added extra layers of meaning with a fractal and a progress bar.

Toloka — logoToloka — logo close-up