The brief
Atlas had grown from one editor to nine surfaces — desktop, web, two mobile apps, a plugin store, docs, a status page, an installer and a marketing site. Four of them had been built by acquired teams. Nothing shared a button, a blue, or a definition of the word "project".
How it went
- 01
Interrogate
We audited every surface and counted the primitives. Fourteen blues. Six button heights. Three different words for the same object in the same release notes. The inconsistency was not a design failure, it was an org chart made visible.
- 02
Position
Atlas sells precision. A product that cannot agree with itself cannot sell precision. We wrote the system as an argument about the product, not a set of preferences about colour.
- 03
Design
One scale, one grid, one set of tokens shipped as code and as a design library from the same source. Nine surfaces, one language, and a naming spine that ended the release-notes problem in the first sprint.
- 04
Ignite
Rollout by surface, not by big bang — the installer first because it is the first thing anyone sees, the marketing site last because it is the easiest to change. Fifty people were trained in two sessions and given the tokens, not a PDF.
What we made
- Brand system: type, colour, motion, voice
- Token set shipped as code and design library
- Component spec across nine surfaces
- Naming spine and product vocabulary
- Rollout sequence and two training sessions
- Governance: who says yes, and how fast
What it moved
- 09
- surfaces on one system
- 14
- blues before, one after
- 50
- people trained in two sessions
“The tokens landed on a Thursday. By the following Thursday two teams had stopped arguing about something they had argued about for a year.”
VP Product, Atlas Studio
Credits
- Strategy
- Ilse Brandt
- Systems design
- Hanne Sørlie
- Front-end
- Tomas Reál
- Programme
- Junia Oyelaran