Fed styles have always gone for grey/metal hulls, prominent Warp nacelles and bridge modules, deflectors (usually), and the rest is really era-dependent. TOS used simple shapes, TMP introduced art-deco, perfect circles, and functional machinery, TNG went organic with ellipses and TNG+ (FC and so on), introduced 'black box' elements on to the grey shapes of TNG, but keeping the organic profiles.
Now, the "scales" I see in Atlom's design keep bringing me back to the segmented hull sections on DS9 (and by extension, Cardassians as a whole). Though when arrayed as feathers I see the scheme working as Romulan/Reman designs as well. So it's odd to see them on Federaiton vessels, since no Federation ship has segmentation this way.