Atlas, an atlas for a modern merchant fleet.

CLIENT

Atlas Cooperatief

ROLE

Identity & wayfinding

SCOPE

Wordmark, 180 pictograms, signage system

YEAR

2022

BRIEF

To build a visual system for a Rotterdam shipping cooperative of 42 member vessels — one that could live on a pier, a shipping container, a phone, and a paper manifest.

APPROACH

A pictogram system before a logo. 180 icons drawn on a 24-unit grid, from "bulk cargo, grain" to "emergency medical, offshore." The wordmark came last, deliberately quiet, so the pictograms could speak first.

OUTCOME

Shipped September 2022. Deployed across three Dutch ports and fourteen vessels. Awarded a Dutch Design Award, 2023. Still in use.

Atlas Cooperatief is what happens when 42 independent Dutch shipping companies decide to share a name. The cooperative exists to pool insurance, lobby the EU on port fees, and maintain a shared maintenance yard in Rotterdam. The brand had to work on ships and on spreadsheets; for dockworkers who didn't speak English and for auditors who didn't speak Dutch.

We started with the pictograms. 180 of them, on a 24-unit grid, covering every cargo type, vessel class, hazard, and operational status the cooperative would ever need to signal. The icons were drawn the way a nautical chart is drawn — with mechanical precision and the expectation that a stranger would need to read them, fast, in bad light, from a distance.

The wordmark is set in Söhne Breit, a typeface with the geometry of port lettering. The identity is quiet on purpose — the work belongs to the ships, not the logo.

NEXT PROJECT →

Field Studio — a studio's own front door