Altry
Client:
Altry Coffee Roastery
Sector:
Café, F&B
Year:
2025-Present
Brand Origin:
Gurugram, HR, India
Services:
Brand Evolution, Experience Design, Brand Direction and Visualisation
Awesome collaboration with:
Sahil Bhambri
for content and coffee
Ratya
for logo design
A coffee brand that refused to be commercial needed a design partner who refused to just deliver and move on. We came in as brand visualisers, showing up the way Altry asked everyone to. Slowly, with intention, and with genuine care for what was being built. Still going.
Altry
A coffee brand that refused to be commercial needed a design partner who refused to just deliver and move on. We came in as brand visualisers, showing up the way Altry asked everyone to. Slowly, with intention, and with genuine care for what was being built. Still going.
Client:
Altry Coffee Roastery
Sector:
Café, F&B
Year:
2025-Present
Brand Origin:
Gurugram, HR, India
Services:
Brand Evolution, Experience Design, Brand Direction and Visualisation
Awesome collaboration with:
Sahil Bhambri
for content and coffee
Ratya
for logo design
Altry is a boutique coffee roastery, eatery, and experimental space tucked inside Crosspoint Mall in Gurgaon. Founded by Sahil Bhambri, a coffee roaster with ten plus years of practice and a background in literature, philosophy, psychology, and community building. The cafe was built as an alternative story to the noise, trends, and jargon that has overtaken the Indian coffee industry. The original logo and core characters, the Altry Man and Ophelia, were designed by the visual artist Ratya in collaboration with Sahil.
Altry is not commercial. It is not trend following. It is culture making. A place where rest is treated as resistance, and where every choice carries intent.
This one didn’t begin with a brief, a deck, or a kickoff call. It began with a friend setting up a roastery and a designer who needed somewhere to play. Sahil and I had been talking for a while before Altry took shape inside Crosspoint Mall, and when the cafe started coming together, the conversation turned into a collaboration without anyone really announcing it. I wanted a project that let me sketch by hand, taste coffee, and try things I couldn’t try elsewhere. Sahil wanted someone who would treat the brand the way he treated his beans. Slowly, with intention, and without rushing the answer. So we just kept going.
Altry didn’t need credibility. Sahil had built the philosophy, the roasting craft, and the cafe’s point of view long before the design conversation began.
The challenge was translation. How do you take an idea like “rest is resistance” and stretch it across an entire ecosystem of touchpoints, surfaces, and small everyday interactions, without diluting the weight that idea carries? How do you design inside a category where almost every cafe is leaning on the same minimal aesthetic, the same calm palette, and the same quiet typography, without falling into the same trap yourself? And how do you do all of it when the logo and the core characters already exist, drawn by another artist, carrying a voice that is not yours?
My job was not to start a brand. It was to extend one, carefully, slowly, without flattening the strange, quiet thing Altry was trying to be in a category that rarely allows strangeness.
The approach for Altry didn’t follow the usual rhythm of brand work. There was no kickoff deck, no formal design direction document, no carefully staged big reveal. The work moved the way the cafe moved. Slowly, in conversation, often over a cup that was still being roasted, tasted, and questioned.
My role was that of a brand visualiser, not a designer starting from scratch. The logo and core characters had already been drawn by another artist, so my job was to build the visual world that surrounded them. That meant spending time understanding how Sahil talked about the brand, how the existing characters carried their own weight, and where the visual language could be stretched without breaking the tone already in place. A lot of the decisions happened at the cafe itself, with a sketchbook open and a coffee being brewed nearby.
Every output, whether functional or experiential, was treated as an extension of the same thought. Nothing was meant to feel like marketing. Everything was meant to feel like Altry.
The brand name already had a strong visual cue baked in: “pixel.” That was the starting point. Instead of going abstract or corporate, the entire identity was built around the idea of the pixel grid as a visual language. Digital screens are literally made of pixels, and so is this brand.
The logo, typography treatments, and brand icon all draw from a pixel-grid system, with the ‘e’ in the word-mark rendered as a literal pixel. This makes the brand instantly recognisable even at small sizes on the actual screens deployed in shops, where every detail has to earn its space. Primary colours were locked to Pixel Yellow and Pixel Black. Yellow demands attention in the visual chaos of a busy shop counter, the kind of colour that holds its own next to a hundred other things competing for your eye. Black gives it the weight of a tech platform that means business. Anek Devanagari was chosen as the typeface, a face born from Indian multilingual design traditions, the right fit for a brand built in India with national ambitions stretching far beyond Bikaner.
A strong identity isn’t just what the world sees on the outside, it’s what the team carries on the inside too. Each team within AdPixel was given its own pixel-branded name: PixelBase for Admin, PixelCast for Sales & Marketing, PixelCrew for Operations. Every team got its own color from the secondary palette, its own business card design, and its own ID card treatment. Culture and identity, built into the same system, so that even the people running the company feel like they belong to the brand they’re building.
On the outward side, ad campaign creatives were designed as part of the initial identity rollout, not as an afterthought. Bold, retro-influenced poster designs with the “SHOW YOUR AD HERE” messaging were built to work both as digital ads and as physical posters, sitting comfortably in the same chaotic, colorful retail environments where AdPixel actually operates day to day.
A brand that started doing the work before the work even began
The clearest sign that an identity is doing its job is when it stops feeling like design and starts feeling like infrastructure. With AdPixel, that shift happened fast. The pixel-led system gave the team something concrete to point to in pitches and partner conversations, the kind of visual clarity that does half the explaining before a single word is spoken. Shop owners started recognizing the yellow before they even knew what the company did, which is exactly how a brand earns its place in a crowded retail street. Advertisers started taking the brand more seriously than its current scale technically warranted, because the identity carried the weight of a company three times its size, and first impressions in pitch meetings often decide the second ones. That’s the quiet power of a well-built brand. It buys the company time and credibility while the actual business catches up to the ambition the design already promised, and in a category as young as this one, that time is everything.
Working on AdPixel was a reminder that the most interesting brand projects aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the loudest categories. Sometimes they’re the ones where the brand has to do the heavy lifting of explaining a category that doesn’t even have a name yet. AdPixel sits in that space, hyperlocal digital advertising at the retail counter level isn’t something most people in India have a mental model for. So the design system had to do double duty. It had to build credibility, and it had to teach.
The pixel grid wasn’t just a stylistic choice, it was a tool for explanation. Every business card, every poster, every screen layout was a tiny lesson in what AdPixel actually does. That’s the kind of brand work I find most rewarding, where design isn’t decoration, it’s the first conversation.
When the work started, AdPixel had a working product, a few active screens, and a handful of partner shops. What it didn’t have was a coherent way to look or sound. By the time the identity rollout was complete, the brand had a wordmark, a system, a tone, a culture, and a campaign-ready visual language that could scale with the network as it grew.
The identity moved from being a logo on a deck to being a recognizable presence on actual retail counters across Bikaner, Nokha, and Shri Dungargarh. Internally, the team adopted the pixel-branded names (PixelBase, PixelCast, PixelCrew) and started using them in everyday conversation, the truest sign that the culture system was working. Externally, the brand’s visual confidence helped it have conversations with national advertisers that a tier-2 startup wouldn’t normally get a meeting for. Every pixel had a purpose. Every counter counted. And the brand that came out of this work feels ready to keep building, one screen, one shop, one city at a time.