Tour Starter · a touring app built from zero

Context & stakes

Articulate Entertainment produces tours and live events, with sponsorships from the likes of Google, VEVO, Adidas, Nike and HBO. Running a tour meant a spreadsheet for flights, another for hotels, a group chat for changes and a shared drive nobody could find anything in.

They wanted one product for it, Tour Starter, and there was nothing to start from: no name on screen, no brand, no website, no components.

The problem

A tour is logistics under pressure. Dozens of people, each with a role, a passport, a shirt size and a flight, move city to city on a schedule that changes daily. The product had to hold all of it and still be quick enough to check on a phone in a venue corridor.

My role & decisions

Designed everything from zero: the identity, the website, every product flow and the design system they are built from.
The tour is the home. Each tour gets its own page with a calendar of show, production, rehearsal and travel days, and tabs for events, accommodation, notes and day files.
Travel as one grid. The travel tracker lays out air, ground, sea and hotel per person per day, so a tour manager sees who is where without opening a single booking.
Roles that match the crew. Personnel are assigned with real touring roles, from Stage Manager and FOH to Backline Tech and Show Caller, which then decide what each person sees.
Onboarding in eight short steps. Profile, address, education, passport, air travel, clothing sizes and an emergency contact, one topic per screen, skippable and finished later.
Desktop and mobile from the same components, including the quiet states: empty tabs, errors and a 404.

Process

Brand and product were designed together, so the identity was tested on real screens from the first week instead of on a moodboard. The system grew out of the flows: every new screen either reused a component or earned a new one, and each one was documented for the developers as it landed.

Assigning personnel with tour roles — Assigning personnel. Real touring roles, picked from a list or typed as a custom role.

Tour Starter onboarding welcome screen — Onboarding starts with one screen and one choice: fill in the profile now, or skip and finish it later.

Results

A complete product designed from zero: brand, website, desktop and mobile app.
One design system under all of it, built from the ground up and handed to engineering with every component documented.
Every core flow of a tour covered in one place, from onboarding and crew roles to calendars, travel, files and messages.

“As a designer, Michał is exactly the type of collaborative partner you want to work with. He crafted a fresh identity for a new web/mobile app and provided a seamless design system from the ground up. His attention to detail and user-first approach made all the difference in shaping an intuitive web and mobile experience. He was always communicative, open to feedback, self-motivated, and often was thinking steps ahead in the project.”
Samuel HelmPM, Articulate Entertainment

What I learned

Starting from zero is easier when brand and product are one job. Every decision about the identity got tested on a real screen the same week, and every screen had a reason to look the way it did. It’s the cheapest way I know to end up with a system that holds together.