Embed, don't visit.
Every project is led by one designer who sits with the product team for the duration of the engagement — in standups, in reviews, in the Slack channel where the actual work happens. We don't drop deliverables and leave.
ABOUT THE STUDIO
Seven years. One client. A studio that didn't have to exist.
The short version of how Atrium came to be, and how we think about the work.
i. The story
We were supposed to be a workaround.
Atrium started in 2019 with three designers and a single mandate: stop hiring agencies. Halcyon had grown to seventy product engineers, twelve product surfaces, and exactly two designers, and the work was suffering for it.
We were given a year to prove that an in-house studio could move faster and ship better work than the agencies we were replacing. Seven years later, we're fourteen designers, we still don't outsource, and the company doesn't ask us to justify the line item anymore.
The studio reports into the COO, not marketing. That decision was made deliberately on day one and we wouldn't change it.
Most of what makes us work is structural — small team, embedded staffing, clear escalation, no committees. The rest is taste.
HOW WE WORK
Four principles, every project.
No design by committee.
One designer holds the pen. The studio reviews, the product team reacts, the designer decides. We've watched too many in-house teams die of consensus and we don't intend to be one of them.
Write before you draw.
Every engagement starts with a one-pager. What's the problem, who is it for, what does the world look like when we've shipped it. No Figma file opens until that doc has been read and reacted to by everyone in the room.
Ship the system, not the screen.
A handsome screen that won't survive next quarter's feature work isn't a win. We design for the version of the product that exists six months from now, and we maintain the library that makes that possible.
THE TRACK RECORD
Seven years of measurable work.
We track the work, not the studio. These are the numbers we report to the COO every quarter — the ones we'd want our own team to ask us about.
- $2.4M
Saved on agency spend, 2025
Versus the prior year's outsourced design budget, including production work.
- 11×
Time-to-first-task, Console v4
From 90 seconds in v3 to 8 seconds in v4. Measured on a sample of 312 new admins.
- 240+
Primitives in the Library
Adopted across forty-one product surfaces. Two systems designers, fully tokenised.
- 94%
Internal partner NPS
From a quarterly survey of the thirteen product orgs we partner with at Halcyon.
WHAT INTERNAL TEAMS SAY
Notes from the partner teams.
Atrium re-drew our onboarding flow over four weeks. Day-seven retention jumped eighteen points. They sat with us in standup the entire time. I cannot remember a more useful four weeks of designer work in my career.
Dorian AleksicPM, Halcyon Customer Activation
The Library was the unblock for our team. We used to spend forty percent of every sprint re-inventing form controls that already existed in three other places. We don't anymore. That number is now zero.
Inez FaramondiEng Director, Halcyon Identity
They push back. Not on everything, but when it matters. Three of the requirements we walked in with on the v4 redesign were wrong, and Atrium told us so in week one. They were right. The work is better for it.
Marcus AhujaVP Product, Halcyon Console
NEXT
Want to work with us?
The fastest path is a brief. Tell us what you're trying to ship, who it's for, and when — we'll come back within a day with whether we can take it on and what the next step looks like.