Applicate
An app for creative minds to manage and unleash their inspiration
Team involved
Anais Díaz
Digital Marketing Specialist
Clarisa Guerra
Lead Marketing
Manolo Ortega
CDO
Antonio Benítez
Team Lead & Back-end Developer
Luisa Jara
Product & Motion Designer
Laura de la Calle
Producer
Look, shoot, organize… fly!
It happens all the time; every second our eyes come across something that excites or inspires us, we want to capture it on our mobile phones, either by taking a photo or a screenshot. However, finding it again for later use is usually complicated and impractical due to the sheer number of images we save every day.
Our mobiles have become more than just a treasure box, a mixed bag in which it is difficult to rediscover what we once kept with great interest.
Coming from the world of fashion, entrepreneur Chiara Pastorelli, knew first hand the usefulness of organizing her inspiration in her phone. She began to envision a digital product that combined with AI, would be like a smart journal of ideas, valuable for freelancers or teams.
The founder spoke with developers, designers, agencies… and finally found Z1. We agreed that Applicate had to be a tool for creatives in industries where visual material is essential, so we decided to offer smart categorization, image editing, and the ability to privately share ideas with collaborators.

Z1 was a perfect fit. I was looking for someone to collaborate with as a true partner—someone who would go beyond just taking instructions.”
Chiara Pastorelli
Founder of Applicate
Bringing creativity to the light
What Chiara envisioned was quite a challenge, so we focused on working with her to design a complex product that would, in contrast, feel simple and beautiful for users.
Our mobiles have become more than just a treasure box, a mixed bag in which it is difficult to rediscover what we once kept with great interest.
As an app designed to organize work, we opted for a clean and elegant design without neglecting the freshness that characterizes the field we operate in: creation. The brand stands on the idea of contrast, on the dichotomy between chaos and order, dark versus light. Light is understood here as the world where we store and categorize our content to make our days easier and more productive.

According to the founder, “Everyone should be able to organize their images based on what they mean to them. Not algorithmically, but personally. They should be able to manage and share all this content privately and personally. Applicate does that work for you, suggesting a label so you can save it.
”What makes it unique is its ability to create collaborative albums with various editing permissions, and you can also add text to images. You can be a fantastic designer, but your work won't function as it should if you don’t have the tools to stay organized.

Our goal was to create a visually intuitive tool that helps professionals focus on what truly matters: the content. We designed the interface to put images front and center, making it easier to get inspired.”
Manolo Ortega
CDO at Z1

Secure, feature-rich and privacy-first
We relied on the new SwiftUI framework to develop the app and took advantage of Apple native features such as URLSession for the frontend connection with the backend. Our engineers opted for GraphQL for the backend API, and managed third-party frameworks with SPM (Swift Package Manager) being the most remarkable Firebase for push notifications, Resolver for dependency injection, and PhotoEditorSDK for image editing.

Additionally, we were extremely cautious about privacy, given that photographs are part of our private information. We spent much time finding the right approach to make professionals feel comfortable and safe in the app.
Thanks to Applicate’s unique combination of developing and design, its users can:
- Label, save, and find content efficiently and purposefully, thanks to machine learning and smart tags.
- Recognize the URL where screenshots were taken from to refer back to the original source.
- Locate and retrieve images instantly based on any of the labels and smart collections.
- Create smart folders to dynamically group images. These folders can be shared with various levels of collaboration between individuals and groups.
- Treat the image with different filters.

The engineering team was excellent and quickly understood the complexity of the task. It was very important for me that the design was not compromised, and Z1 developers delivered on this.”
Manolo Ortega
CDO at Z1

Early adopters’ feedback
We designed an elegant landing page in Webflow and launched Applicate ensuring an optimal deployment on the App Store. We also helped the founder raise brand awareness and get early adopters across multiple channels, paid and organic, from Product Hunt to social media and PR. The initial feedback has been truly positive.


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“Love this app! It's a wonderful free tool that will help save me so much time. I create content for my clients on social media and it's so useful to organise my photos and label them, as well as collating things that inspire me.”
Joanna Abel
@joanna_abel
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“A truly fantastic app and so useful in my work in real estate, with managing and sharing my screenshots. Excited to see all the possibilities and to share it with clients.”
Leslie Darnley
@leslie_darnley