Atly: an identity for curation over chaos

Brand identity · Design system · Guidelines · 2026

Atly needed a brand that made its case before a single feature got explained. The work runs from the pin-and-bubble symbol through colour, type and a collage language, and it lands on one idea: curation should feel like the opposite of a crowded map. The guidelines exist so the system keeps holding once other people are running it.

Role
Sole designer: identity, guidelines, rollout
Timeline
Guidelines shipped 2026
Client
Atly, in-house, as Design Lead
Headline
One system, app icon to out-of-home
Context & problem

The company

Atly curates places around taste and whatever the moment calls for. It scores the features of individual places across trusted sources instead of ranking by popularity, so a search returns a fit rather than a crowd.

The brief

Most discovery platforms run on popularity: trending, highly rated, widely visited. That gives you crowded maps, inflated reviews and recommendations built for everyone in general and nobody in particular. The identity had to take the other side of that argument, and do it on first impression.

Atly brand landing: Know where to go, big-type collage over a purple field

Logo

Atly logo lockup Atly logo construction: place pin plus chat bubble

Two shapes, rotated and merged: a map pin for the place, a chat bubble for the buzz around it. They resolve into a single mark that carries both. Hover to see the construction.

Atly logo on colour, on image, and in single-colour variants
Atly brand colour palette: gradients, accents and neutrals

Typography

League Gothic takes the headlines. It is condensed and loud, which is what the big-type compositions need. Inter carries everything else in four weights, shared with the product design system so brand and interface stay in step.

League Gothic
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890 !@#$%^&*()+=-
Inter
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890 !@#$%^&*()+=-
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890 !@#$%^&*()+=-
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890 !@#$%^&*()+=-
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890 !@#$%^&*()+=-

Photography

Real, unstyled, people first. Crowded tables, kitchens, streets, dogs. This is raw material for the collages, so every frame has to survive being cut up and still read.

Atly photography direction, a grid of candid people-first images

Campaigns

Sell the sector, not the app

Nobody goes looking for a mapping app. They go looking for a work-friendly café, somewhere that can handle a four year old, a place the dog is welcome too. Each campaign takes one of those intents and speaks only to that, so the ad lands as an answer instead of an advert.

The topic is the hook

Leading with a subject someone already cares about buys the first tap. Behind each one sits the same product and the same map, filtered to the sector in the headline. Prove the map on the thing they came for and subscribing stops being a pitch, it becomes the obvious next step.

Atly sector campaigns: date night, focus zones and bark & brew in the dark treatment; vegan, dog-friendly and kid-friendly spots in the bright one
Atly out-of-home wall mural in big condensed type

In the product

The brand does its loudest work at onboarding, then gets out of the way. Once someone is inside the map, the neutrals and Inter take over and the results stay legible. Knowing when to stop is part of the system.

Atly product screens: onboarding in the brand voice, then map and place views in the neutral interface palette
Atly marketing site close, Your kind of places
Desktop · the close, “Your kind of places”. The full build is its own case study: Atly.com.

Results

Where it landed

Shipped in 2026. It now runs across the app, the marketing site, the app icon, sector campaigns and out-of-home.

What it has to hold

One of three pieces of Atly work here. The pivot redesign came first and the guidelines came out of it, which is why product, identity and the web presence pull in the same direction instead of being reconciled after the fact.

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