The system behinda quieter kindof trust.

Lyra is a talent marketplace for women, built on a transparent matching algorithm. Every brand decision flows from one promise: the system is on your side, and you can read it.

Promise

Job matches built on what you've done. Not who you know.

The headline is the contract. Everything else — copy, palette, motion, photography — defends it.

Audience

Women ready to be seen accurately.

Sceptical of black-box hiring tools. They have receipts. They want a fair read, not a flattering one.

Adjacent feel

Form & Found meets Apollo Magazine meets a clean lab.

Editorial, but warm. Technical, but quiet. Never corporate diversity-deck.

Brand pillars

Transparent

Every score is explainable. The brand reads the same way: legible, never theatrical.

Earned

Match % rises through skill, not pitch. The visual system rewards depth over decoration.

Luminous

Light through glass, not flat colour. Prismatic, iridescent, agate — never gradient soup.

Quiet

Confidence by understatement. Wide margins, generous type, no urgency theatre.

Signature illustration: three women, prismatic interiors. The brand's visual thesis in one frame — presence, plurality, refraction.

The Lyra mark is a single four-pointed star (✦) rendered in ash black with three layered shadows — a thin white highlight, a soft cast, and a faint glow. It reads as a small object catching light rather than a flat shape. The mark always sits to the upper-right of the wordmark, in italic to match it.

Lyra✦AI

Lyra✦AI

The mark, large

✦

The glyph is Unicode U+2726 set in Instrument Serif italic. Three stacked drop-shadows give it depth — a thin highlight above, a soft cast below, and a faint outline glow — so it reads dimensional without ever resorting to gradient fills.

Reference

The inspiration, not the destination. Our mark borrows the prismatic mood but distils it down to a single ash glyph. The light is implied, not painted. The restraint is the brand.

Variants

✦

Color · on cream

✦

Ink · monochrome

✦

Color · on void

✦

Cream · monochrome

Clear space

Reserve at least one star-height of clear space on every side. The shadow halo counts as part of the mark — never crop it.

Minimum size

16px digital, 14mm print. Below 14px the shadows collapse and the letter-form thins — use the wordmark without the star instead.

Lockup

Star always to the upper-right of the wordmark, offset by 0.55em above the baseline. Tracking on the word: −0.02em.

Do not

• — Don't recolour the star. It is ash black on cream, cream on void. Nothing else.
• — Don't outline or fill the star with a gradient. Depth comes from the shadows.
• — Don't substitute another star glyph (★, ☆, ✨). It must be U+2726.
• — Don't stretch, condense, or italicise further. Instrument Serif is already italic.
• — Don't pair the wordmark with another serif. Instrument Serif owns the lockup.
• — Don't use the mark on a busy photograph without a tonal scrim.

The palette is extracted from agate cross-sections, iridescent film, and prismatic glass — never picked from a colour-wheel generator. Cream and ink are the contract; everything else is illumination.

Foundation

Cream

cream

#F4F1EB

244 · 241 · 235

Primary surface. Editorial calm. Every section starts here unless rhythm demands otherwise.

Cream deep

cream-deep

#E8E1D2

232 · 225 · 210

Section dividers, hover states, soft inset surfaces. Never main background.

Ink

ink

#1A1A1A

26 · 26 · 26

Body and display type on cream. Never pure black — the warmth matters.

Void

void

#0E0C0A

14 · 12 · 10

Dark sections. Carries prism and grain. Use sparingly, for rhythm.

Agate & mineral accents

Warm side of the palette. Use as light, not fill — behind glass, inside an orb, as a wash. Never solid blocks of these.

Agate coral

agate-coral

#C8745A

200 · 116 · 90

Heat. Anchors candidate-side surfaces. Use ≤ 15% surface area.

Agate peach

agate-peach

#E8B89C

232 · 184 · 156

Soft glow. Inside prism orbs, behind glass cards.

Mineral pink

mineral-pink

#E4B8C9

228 · 184 · 201

Selection highlight, signature wash. The colour of the brand's recognition.

Prism amber

prism-amber

#D4A56A

212 · 165 · 106

Editorial accent. Pull-quote underline, numbered indices, rare warm spark.

Iridescent cools

The cool half. Anchors the employer/transparency side and gives void sections their inner light.

Iridescent lilac

iridescent-lilac

#B8B5D8

184 · 181 · 216

Focus rings, link accents, prism inner-light. Quiet authority.

Iridescent sky

iridescent-sky

#9FB6D4

159 · 182 · 212

Employer-side surfaces. Transparency reports, audit visuals.

Ink soft

ink-soft

#2A2520

42 · 37 · 32

One step warmer than ink. Use on void surfaces for layered depth.

Where the palette comes from

Each colour is sampled from a physical reference — agate cross-sections, iridescent film, prismatic glass. The image below the swatches is the mineral the colour was pulled from.

Agate coral

Polished coral agate, cross-section

Iridescent sky

Lapis-pink marble with gold flecks

Iridescent lilac

Refracted light through bubble film

Prism amber

Sunset prism on linen

The palette is loud only if you let it be. Dominant cream or void carries 60% of every surface. One accent carries 30%. A second accent carries 10% — never more.

Warm composition · on cream

• Cream#F4F1EB60%
• Mineral pink#E4B8C930%
• Agate coral#C8745A10%

Candidate-side surfaces. Warm without being loud. Pink does most of the work; coral is the spark.

Cool composition · on cream

• Cream#F4F1EB60%
• Iridescent sky#9FB6D430%
• Iridescent lilac#B8B5D810%

Employer-side surfaces. Transparency reports, audit visuals, data charts.

Night composition · on void

• Void#0E0C0A60%
• Iridescent lilac#B8B5D830%
• Prism amber#D4A56A10%

Rhythm sections. The waitlist CTA. Anywhere the brand needs depth.

Editorial composition · on void

• Void#0E0C0A60%
• Cream#F4F1EB30%
• Mineral pink#E4B8C910%

Pull-quote moments. Photography overlays. The most photographic of the palettes.

Working pairings · text on surface

The quick brown fox jumps over.

Body sample on this pairing.

✓ Cream + ink

16.1:1 · Default editorial pairing.

The quick brown fox jumps over.

Body sample on this pairing.

✓ Void + cream

17.4:1 · Dark rhythm sections.

The quick brown fox jumps over.

Body sample on this pairing.

✓ Cream deep + ink

13.8:1 · Inset cards, hover states.

The quick brown fox jumps over.

Body sample on this pairing.

✓ Agate coral + cream

4.9:1 · Just clears AA. Use for small CTA fills.

The quick brown fox jumps over.

Body sample on this pairing.

✕ Cream + mineral pink

1.3:1 · Decorative only. Never as type.

The quick brown fox jumps over.

Body sample on this pairing.

✕ Cream + ink at 40% alpha

2.9:1 · Fails AA. Use ink/55+ (4.2:1) for body.

Sample compositions

The same headline rendered across four palette compositions. Each works. None is louder than the message.

For candidates

See your real fit, not a filter.

Cream 60 · Mineral pink 30 · Agate coral 10.

For employers

Bias-audited matching, read it yourself.

Cream 60 · Iridescent sky 30 · Iridescent lilac 10.

Waitlist

The first hundred shape the matching itself.

Void 60 · Iridescent lilac 30 · Prism amber 10.

Pull quote

“Finally, an algorithm I can argue with.”

Void 60 · Cream 30 · Mineral pink 10.

Mixing rules

• — Two accents per composition, maximum. Three is gradient soup.
• — Warm and cool can mix, but never at equal weight.
• — Mineral pink is always the lightest note. Never the loudest.
• — Agate coral is the only colour that may sit beside the wordmark.
• — Iridescent sky and iridescent lilac may share a composition. Pick one to lead.
• — Never use a colour at 100% on more than 35% of a surface.

Instrument Serif carries every display moment — headlines, pull quotes, the wordmark itself. Inter does everything else. There is no third typeface. Adding one breaks the brand.

Lyra's photography is the antidote to corporate-diversity-deck stock. Real light, real texture, real moments. Warm tones that sit inside the cream palette — never cool blue HR-brochure light.

Hero photograph

Light, broken into its colours — that's the brand in one photograph.

Light

Soft, golden, side-lit. Late afternoon through a window. Avoid: ring lights, flat overhead, fluorescent.

Subject

A woman mid-thought, mid-work, mid-coffee. Not posing. The camera caught her.

Texture

Linen, paper, mineral, glass. Surfaces that hold light. Hands and skin as material.

Crop

Generous. Closer to a magazine spread than a product card. Let the subject breathe.

Never

• — Stock photography of women laughing at salads.
• — Cold, blue, corporate HQ glass-tower shots.
• — Direct eye-contact “hire me” posed portraits.
• — Tokenised diversity sets that look composed.
• — Filters that flatten skin or push saturation.
• — Anything from a generative image model unless explicitly labelled.

Lyra writes like a precise older sister, not a brand. Short sentences. Concrete claims. Quiet authority. No exclamation marks, no “empowerment,” no “reimagining.”

A brand is only as strong as the smallest decision it survives. These are the rules that, when broken, quietly degrade everything else.

Lyra is built by Stephany Oliveros and Kristina Talova — researcher-operator and educator-operator, both based in Barcelona. Every brand decision lands here before it ships.

The founding team

Stephany & Kristina — Barcelona, 2026.

CEO & Co-founder

Stephany Oliveros

Psychology researcher and AI product strategist. Stephany works at the intersection of AI and psychology — she's spent her career inside fintech, legaltech, and healthcare AI, asking the same question each time: why is the algorithm allowed to be unaccountable?

MWC Barcelona speaker · UN-supported initiative lead

“A fair read, not a flattering one. That's the whole product.”

LinkedIn→

COO & Co-founder

Kristina Talova

Educator-operator with nearly a decade designing learning experiences across TransPerfect, Luxoft, and SPEECH. Kristina runs the operating system behind Lyra — partnerships, workshops, the live human work that turns a product into a community.

Women in Tech Global speaker · workshop architect

“The match percentage is a starting point. The next step is what we owe her.”

LinkedIn→

One reader, one decision.

Brand questions go to whoever is closer to the surface in question. Conflicts escalate to a single 15-min sync, not a thread.

Founders sign off on hero copy.

Section heads can ship body copy autonomously. The headline of any new page goes through both founders.

Photography of the founders is editorial only.

Never as testimonial-style portraits. The founders are stewards of the product, not the product.