UI/UX & Branding
Product design and brand identity that make a young company look like the category leader it intends to become.
- Average lift in task completion
- +41%Average lift in task completion
- Reduction in support tickets
- -33%Reduction in support tickets
- Components in a typical system
- 60+Components in a typical system
How we approach this
Design work that earns its place: research to find out what users actually struggle with, interface design that removes those obstacles, and a brand system that stays coherent as you add pages, products and people. Everything ships as a documented design system, not a folder of one-off screens.
Research first, and it is usually uncomfortable
We start by watching people use whatever exists today — your product, a competitor's, or the spreadsheet they use instead. Eight to ten sessions is normally enough to see the same three obstacles repeatedly, and those three obstacles are the brief.
This part is uncomfortable because it frequently contradicts what the team believed. We have had projects where the feature everyone wanted to build turned out to solve a problem nobody had. Finding that out in week two costs a fortnight; finding it out after launch costs the quarter.
Interfaces designed against real content
We design with your actual data — the customer whose name runs to forty characters, the empty state on day one, the list with four hundred rows. Designs that only work with tidy placeholder content fall apart the moment they meet production.
Every screen ships with its loading, empty, error and permission-denied states drawn. Those states are where most products feel broken, and they are almost always the ones left to engineers to improvise.
A brand system, not a logo
Identity work covers the mark, but the durable part is everything around it: a type scale that holds up from a mobile caption to a billboard, a colour system with contrast ratios that pass accessibility checks, photography and illustration direction, and written tone-of-voice guidance with real examples.
The test we hold ourselves to is whether someone who has never met us can produce an on-brand page from the guidelines alone. If they cannot, the system is not finished.
Delivered as code-ready tokens
Design hands over as tokens — named values for colour, spacing, type, radius and elevation — that map one-to-one onto what engineers implement. That removes the usual argument about whether a margin is 24 or 25 pixels, because neither team is guessing.
Where you have an engineering team, we build the component library alongside them in Storybook so the design system and the codebase are the same thing rather than two drifting documents.
What you get
- User research, interviews and usability testing
- Information architecture and user flows
- High-fidelity UI design and prototypes
- Brand identity, logo system and visual language
- Design system with tokens and components
- Brand and product guidelines
Is this the right service for you?
We would rather tell you no early than take on work we would do badly. Here is where this service earns its keep, and where it doesn't.
A good fit if
- You are pre-Series A and your product looks younger than it is
- Your product has grown organically and now feels inconsistent
- You have grown by acquisition and have several conflicting identities
- Design and engineering are arguing about handover
Probably not if
- You want a logo only, with no system around it
- The real problem is that the product does not work yet
- Nobody internally can be freed up for research sessions
How a ui/ux & branding project runs
- 01
Listen
Stakeholder interviews, eight to ten user sessions, and an audit of the current experience. We come back with the three obstacles worth fixing.
- 02
Structure
Information architecture, user flows and low-fidelity wireframes. Cheap to change, and where the real design decisions actually get made.
- 03
Craft
High-fidelity screens against real content, every state drawn, tested with users again before anything is considered final.
- 04
Systematise
Tokens, components and written guidelines, built with your engineers so the system lives in the codebase rather than only in Figma.
Ways to work with us
Starting prices, not quotes. You get a fixed number in writing after discovery — these are here so you can tell early whether we're in your range.
UX audit
Heuristic review plus five moderated usability sessions on your existing product, returned as a prioritised list of problems ranked by how many users hit them.
- From
- $8,000
- Typical timeline
- 2–3 weeks
- Best for
- Products with a known drop-off
Brand identity
Positioning, logo system, colour, type, imagery direction and tone of voice, delivered as a guidelines document plus production-ready assets.
- From
- $25,000
- Typical timeline
- 5–7 weeks
- Best for
- Repositioning or a first real identity
Product design + system
Research, end-to-end interface design and a documented, token-driven design system built with your engineers.
- From
- $55,000
- Typical timeline
- 10–14 weeks
- Best for
- Products that need to scale consistently
UI/UX & Branding questions
The ones that come up on nearly every call for this service.
- Do we need a full design system, or is that overkill?
- It is overkill below a certain scale. If you have one designer, two engineers and a single product, a shared Figma file and a component folder will serve you better. A system pays for itself once multiple people are making interface decisions in parallel and you are shipping the same component for the third time.
- How many users do you need to talk to?
- Eight to ten for a given user type. Past that you stop learning new things — the same obstacles keep coming up. We would rather run ten sessions properly than survey four hundred people and learn what they think they do rather than what they actually do.
- Can you work with our existing brand guidelines?
- Yes. A good deal of our product work sits inside a brand someone else established. If we think a guideline is actively hurting usability — contrast that fails accessibility checks is the usual one — we will flag it with evidence and let you decide.
- Do you hand over the source files?
- Everything: the Figma files with the full version history, the component library, exported assets in every format you need, and the editable brand source files. It is all yours, with no ongoing licence and no need to ask us before changing anything.
- Will you also build what you design?
- Usually, and it removes the handover gap entirely. But we are happy to design for your engineers instead — in that case we build the component library with them and stay available for review during implementation, which is where most design intent normally gets lost.
Need ui/ux & branding help?
Send us the brief, the half-written brief, or just the problem. We'll come back with what we'd do and what it costs.