Brand, mascot and app for an AI travel guide built on local knowledge

Hint started as Mr Franz: curated city maps made by people who live in each city. As it grew into an app, the founders renamed it Hint, and it needed a brand to match, a character people remember and a product worth opening on every trip.

Hint is based in Milan and runs as an app on iOS and Android that matches travelers with locals and shows their picks on a personal map. We designed the brand and the mascot, the app that Hint’s own team built, the gethint.com website, a 3-minute launch film and a street event in Rome.

Client

Hint (formerly Mr Franz)

Industry

Consumer travel app

Services

Brand identity · Mascot and illustration · App design · App Store screenshots · Website design · Motion design · Social and print · Event design

Timeline

2026

Travelers now ask a chatbot where to eat. Hint’s answer had to feel human, local and a little cheeky, in a category full of blue map pins.

The product sells local knowledge, so the brand could not look like another AI tool. It also had to work everywhere at once, because the rebrand, the app and the first marketing all landed in the same year.

01

Human, not generic

The brand had to feel like a friend who lives in the city, not a search box with a logo.

02

From maps to a product

A creator-led project of curated maps was becoming an app with accounts, bundles and a map of its own.

03

Many surfaces at once

App, App Store, website, social, print and a street event all had to read as one brand from day one.

We started from the brand identity, because everything else would stand on it: the app, the website, the launch film and the street event.

First came the moodboards. One gathered calm, wordmark-led travel brands, the other bold symbol marks that still read at the size of an app icon, and a third collected playful typefaces for the headlines.

Then we explored over several rounds. The first tried a heavy wordmark with a map pin for the dot, a lighter one in green, orange and purple, and a yellow one with looping letters. We refined the looping letters into the lowercase hint, then tested a graphic language of routes, loops and city names before settling the system in the guide.

The final identity rests on a custom lowercase wordmark, a deep purple and a loud set of color pairs, so every screen and poster reads as Hint before you see the name. Neulis carries the headlines and Neulis Sans the interface, and the guide sets out how the logo, colors and type land on merch, posters and signage.

We are now designing a custom typeface for Hint as the next step for the brand.

The mascot is the local friend in every screen. It points, waves, puts on sunglasses and shows up on cups, kiosks and App Store screens.

It went through two rounds of exploration before it settled into a small cast of poses and colors that hold up at the size of an app icon and the size of a street poster.

The campaign boards put it to work: standing in for a letter in “say no”, and in motion below, animated from the boards’ own vector artwork, slithering through “go beyond” to catch a map pin and riding the route to the hint wordmark.

With the brand in place, we mapped the core flows in grey: the map at every zoom level, city and region bundles, and a radius tool that unlocks the spots around you.

Before the wireframes, we gathered three moodboards of travel and map apps, one per direction: friendly and clean, social and playful, and calm and curated.

Most of the time went into the UX. We redesigned the wireframes several times as the flows changed and new features came in, from bundles and the radius tool to chat with Scout, the AI travel buddy, until every path through the app held together.

With the flows settled, we designed the high-fidelity app and a component library on top, and Hint’s own team built the app from it.

The library covers buttons, pins, place cards, search, navigation and chat, so the map, the saved spots and Scout all come from one set of parts.

The web app had to show the same information as the mobile app and be just as easy to use.

Scout and the map sit side by side, and the maps, bundles and place pages carry over from mobile, laid out for a bigger screen.

The store screenshots tell the story in the order people scroll: where to go next, every spot in one place, picks from locals, a collection of your own and a travel buddy in your pocket.

Each screen pairs one short line with a real view of the app, and the mascot and color pairs carry over from the brand guide, so the listing looks like the product people download.

We designed gethint.com around one job: getting people from a first visit into the app.

We explored the homepage in six color variants, from the hero with the app in hand to the city map passes, before settling the direction with the team.

Inner pages sell the city maps and passes with the same cards and colors.

For the Rome launch we also designed the event’s own site, getahint.com (opens in a new tab): one long scroll that offers a free map of Rome and shows, with photos and illustrations, why most visitors end up in the same few places.

We produced Hint’s 3-minute launch film, told in the brand’s own colors with the mascot as the guide.

Every scene was storyboarded before animation started: the wordmark bursting in, travel photos framed by the logo, and the mascot moving from a city map to the desert and Mount Fuji.

For social we built carousel templates that turn local tips into posts: skip the famous restaurants, get lost on purpose, find your morning bakery.

In print, the same system runs across mugs, tote bags and shop signage.

For Hint’s street event in Rome, 7 to 9 August 2026, we designed the kiosk: banners, posters, a fold-out map, cup stickers and a long fence banner promising free gelato, free pizza and a free Rome.

The posters carry a QR code for a free map of Rome, so people walking past can try the app on the spot. The code leads to the event’s own website, getahint.com (opens in a new tab), which we also designed.