Wheely
No lord needs to buy you a Mercedes Benz when you can simply download an app and have luxury limousines with chauffeurs at hand – that’s what Wheely stands for, a top notch fusion between a car rental and Uber. Founded in 2010 by Anton Chirkunov, the company today operates from London and offers its services in London, Paris, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Dubai. As of 2019, Wheely had over 100 employees and worked with around 3,000 self-employed chauffeurs as partners.
The interface design is the work of Moscow-based graphic designer and art director Illo Bozhko. While the used pictures share a warm tonality, they alternate with generous fields of text, mostly black and white, that feature a classic combination of all-caps headlines and no-nonsense ragged right copy.
The typeface used is Stratos, designed by Yoann Minet and initially released in 2016 at Production Type. It is a sans with a couple of interesting features. To begin with, the caps follow a condensed formula in which they differ from the more geometric, modernist approach of the lowercase. Secondly, the whole family was conceived in a way that the width of the lines will stay consistent when you change the weight of the font, a quality especially useful for magazine layouts. And finally, in 2017/18, the family was completed with Greek by Irene Vlachou and Cyrillic by Ilya Ruderman and Yury Ostromentsky (see Wheely’s Russian website), making it a perfect choice for a business with European ambitions.
