Thu, Oct 8
With Sam, Noor + 140 more
Fri, Oct 9
With Priya, Jonah + 35 more
Sat, Oct 10
With Lauren + 86 more
Sun, Oct 11
With Noor + 57 more
Tonight · 10:00 PMWith Alex, Noor, Sam + 309 more
Wed, Oct 14
Thu, Oct 15
Fri, Oct 16
Sat, Oct 17
Mon, Oct 19
Fri, Oct 30
Tonight · 6:00 PMThu, Oct 8With Sam, Noor + 140 moreFri, Oct 9With Priya, Jonah + 35 moreSat, Oct 10With Lauren + 86 moreSun, Oct 11With Noor + 57 moreTonight · 10:00 PMWith Alex, Noor, Sam + 309 moreWed, Oct 14case study
Valley. Founder nights in San Francisco, billed like posters.
Valley is an iPhone app for founder events in San Francisco: pitch nights, dinners, build nights and run clubs, with the people who are going named on every card. We designed the brand, the app and the Brand Canon, the brand written down so AI tools can follow it.
- Scope
- Brand identity, app design, Brand Canon
- Platform
- iPhone, iOS 26
- Market
- San Francisco
- Project
- Studio project, 2026
Pitch night No. 14Founder dinner, table for 40Build night: AI agentsOcean Beach run clubRooftop, after the demosLong table, Hayes ValleySlipway demo day, S26Robotics meetupDumplings, Inner RichmondCoffee with operatorsMonth-end dinner, No. 2Office hours: pre-seed
The whole thing, in 43 seconds.
0:00 / 0:00
01 / Brief
An app for founder nights in San Francisco.
The ask was an events-first iPhone app for the startup scene. Founders, investors, operators and hosts find tonight's events, see who's going, meet people there and host nights of their own. Matching was in scope, but light, and second to the events. The feel: bold, playful and dark. The only thing given was the name.
01
Discover
Founder events tonight and this week, across the city, in one feed.
02
See who’s going
Friends named first, on the card, before anyone decides to go.
03
Meet people
At the event, then in messages after it. Matching helps. The room comes first.
04
Host
Post a night, fill the room and check people in at the door.
02 / Problem
A count is not a reason to go.
Founder events live in group chats, links and screenshots. The link says 142 going: a count, with no names. You find out who came once you're in the room, which is too late to plan who to meet. Names are the reason to go, so names had to come first.
What the link says
142 going
What Valley says
With Sam, Noor + 140 more
The group chat
anyone going to pitch night thurs?
no idea, link says 142 going
Pitch night No. 14
Garage 41 · 142 going
On Valley
Thu, Oct 8With Sam, Noor + 140 more03 / Concept
Posters. Real nights.
In San Francisco, the walls outside venues are pasted up with the city's nights, gig posters over gig posters. Valley borrows that wall for founder nights. A gig poster bills who's on, so every event page bills its founders the same way. And the crowd becomes one line on every card, friends named first.
Loud
In the type. Big Shoulders Display sets every name at full volume.
Real
In the photos. Real nights in the room’s own light, never posed.
Social
In the With line. Who’s going is the headline, friends named first.
04 / Identity
A wordmark with a valley and a peak.
VALLEY is drawn, not typed. The name dips, then climbs. Everything around it is set in sentence case, and it holds up as objects too: the icon as a block, a ticket stub, the date tags as stickers.
- 1The V is cut from the top, down to a point.
- 2The A has no crossbar. Its cut climbs from the foot. A valley, then a peak.
Each colour, its own job.
In the app, Poster Yellow has three jobs: the action, the selected state and the date tag. Riso Orange means live, or almost gone. Lilac marks a host, once a screen at most. Everything else is Wall Black, Board, Newsprint and Grey Stock.
Loud names, calm words.
Big Shoulders Display sets titles, names and the lineup at full volume, in sentence case. Schibsted Grotesk sets everything you read through. Seven sizes cover the whole app. The type does the shouting, so the copy never has to.
Pitch night No. 14 · Pitching tonight
- 01Maya Okafor
- 02Jonah Weiss
- 03Leila Haddad
- 04Tom Becker
- 05Kwame Mensah
- 06Priya Raman
Seven sizes, 44 to 13
- TonightDisplay 44
- Pitch night No. 14Title 36
- This weekHeading 26
- Maya Okafor / Jonah WeissBilling 20
- Six founders, three judges, one mic.Body 17
- With Sam, Noor + 140 moreLabel 15
- Garage 41, Dogpatch · Doors at 7:00Meta 13
Real nights, one grade.
Every event shows a photo of the night itself: people mid-laugh or mid-sentence, in the room’s own light. Every photo is graded as one shoot, with lifted blacks and warm highlights, so a pitch night and a beach run can sit on the same wall.
Thu, Oct 8Fri, Oct 9Sat, Oct 10Sun, Oct 11Tonight · 10:00 PMWed, Oct 14Thu, Oct 15Fri, Oct 16Sat, Oct 17Mon, Oct 19Fri, Oct 30Tonight · 6:00 PM
05 / App
Twelve flows, all about the night.
Discover, Map, Meet, Wall and Inbox sit in a floating glass tab bar. Behind them are twelve flows, from onboarding and tickets to event chats and hosting, and the quiet screens got the same care as the loud ones.
0
screens. 12 flows. Every state.
99 of them here, captured straight from the flows: onboarding to the door scanner, with every empty, loading, offline and error state.
Wheatpaste, on every RSVP.
Tap RSVP and the night pastes onto your Wall like a poster outside the venue. That’s 520 ms from tap to “You’re on the list”. With Reduce Motion on, it’s a straight crossfade.
Tonight · 7:30 PMPitch night No. 14
With Sam, Noor + 140 more
Try it: tap RSVP.
- 0 msTapRSVP, the one yellow button
- 120 msSlapThe night lands at 106% and 4°, still wet
- 320 msSettlePressed to a dead stop at 1.5°, one heavy haptic
- 520 msOn the listYour name joins the With line
The city, tonight.
The map draws real San Francisco streets in Valley’s dark palette. Pins carry start times, friends’ faces show where they’re going, live counts are orange, and dragging through the week moves the whole city.
The people are the lineup.
The event page reads like a gig poster. Pitch night No. 14 bills its six founders in running order, then who’s going, then the host. One date tag, one yellow button, nothing else competing for attention.
06 / Canon
The brand, written for AI.
An AI tool can do nothing with “use the yellow, mostly”. It can follow a rule. The Brand Canon is Valley's guideline rewritten as exact, testable rules, with tokens, templates and a pre-flight check, packaged as a Claude skill and a ChatGPT project.
“Poster Yellow is used only for: the primary action (one per view), the selected state (including the selected pin and the venue pin on a map), the date tag, and the logo on brand pieces with no date tag.”
Ten requests, from the canon alone.
Then we tested it. Everyday requests, from an event poster and a weekly email to App Store panels and push notifications, each made with nothing but the canon. Where a piece missed, the miss traced back to a gap in the canon, and the canon was fixed before release.
07 / Launch
Off the phone, onto the street.
Everything to put Valley in front of people: the App Store panels, the website, social posts, ads, print and three launch films.
Out on the street.
The identity holds up off the phone: a billboard in SoMa, a wheatpaste wall in Dogpatch, a bus shelter in the Mission, a host’s cards on a bar, the tote, the tee and the badge at the door.
What we made.
Brand identity
- The drawn wordmark, the stacked lockup, the V, the sheet and the strip
- The app icon for iOS, with dark and tinted looks
- A logo package in every colourway
- Colour, type, the photo grade and the graphic elements
- The brand guideline, 134 boards in 16 chapters
App design
- Twelve flows and 541 screens, with every sheet, alert, toast and state
- The Lock Screen, a Live Activity, the Dynamic Island, widgets and a Wallet pass
- A component library and 85 icons
- A clickable prototype with the real motion
Brand Canon
- The brand as numbered rules you can test
- Tokens as JSON, CSS and Figma variables
- Templates, from the event poster to the tote
- A Claude skill and a ChatGPT project
- A proof set of blind requests
Launch
- A marketing website with five feature pages
- Ten App Store panels
- Eight social posts with captions
- Posters, cards, stickers, a tote, a tee, a badge and banners
- Ads for Meta, Google and LinkedIn
- 3D renders, photo scenes and three launch films
See who’s going.
Then go.
0app screens
0flows
0guideline boards
0icons
0App Store panels
0launch films
Valley is a UI Wiki Studio project. Its people, companies, venues and events are invented. Photos are licensed stock and generated stand-ins, graded as one set. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.