Dorsia is the new travel app for “untourists” — non-conformists — and it is the newest project to come out of Ueno’s design laboratories in New York and San Francisco. Founded by Andrew Armenante, a self-described flâneur and man-about-town, the Dorsia app uses “fancy algorithms” to identify “the places where everybody wants to be before everybody wants to be there — providing users with an always up-to-date source of safe spaces to descend upon.” The app currently covers 15 global metropoles and is rapidly expanding.
At the heart of Dorsia is the belief that every city has a secret, its own rhythm, its own secret handshake, and that finding it is what makes a city worth visiting. Ueno’s branding “aimed for a strong brand that won’t do as it’s told — a bourgeois punk, a real square peg, exemplified by the ‘pinkies up’ logo and the tragically hip, slightly naive, wordmark to go with it.”
And since a travel app requires a lot of photography, Ueno deployed a strategy of curated user-generated images from Instagram and paired them with complimentary city illustrations.
