Brand design for software companies
A brand that survives contact with your product
Logo, colour and type — and then the part most brand work skips: the tokens, the icon at every size, the social images, the rules your team and your AI tool can both follow. Delivered as files and code you own, not as a PDF nobody opens twice.
Have a moodboard, a competitor you admire, or a logo you already hate? Attach it. Knowing what you do not want saves a round.
- How it starts
- A written brief or a file you already have, then a call. Both free.
- Who does the work
- Nikola, plus a named collaborator where production design is involved — named before they start, never a bench.
- What you get
- Artefacts you own and can hand to any team, including one that is not us.
- Payment
- Split across agreed milestones. Nothing hourly by surprise.
How a project works
Why software brands break
A brand made for a pitch deck falls apart in a product
The deliverable most brand work produces is a beautiful document. Then the product gets built, and none of the questions the product asks are in it.
- The logo that vanishes at 16 px
- A mark designed at 800 px on a white slide becomes a grey smudge in a browser tab. The tab is where most people see it most often.
- Colours that fail contrast
- A palette chosen for a hero image produces button text nobody can read and an accessibility failure on every screen. Contrast pairs are a design decision, not a developer's problem.
- Type licensed for print
- A beautiful family with no web licence, or one that costs more per month than your hosting. This is checked before it is chosen, not after.
- No favicon, so Google shows someone else's
- This site carried Lovable's heart icon beside its name in search results for weeks after leaving, because Google asks for /favicon.ico at the root and keeps whatever it last found. We shipped a PNG and thought that was enough.
- Rules nobody can apply
- 'Use the brand blue generously' is not a rule a developer or an AI builder can act on. `--brand-navy: #143e7b` and a spacing scale are.
- Screen nineteen looks nothing like screen two
- Without tokens and components, every new screen is a fresh set of small decisions. Twenty screens later the product looks like four products.
What it costs
Three depths, depending on how much of your product the brand has to reach
The difference between these rows is not how pretty the logo is. It is how far the system extends — from a mark and some files, to tokens and components your product is actually built from.
Brand essentials
$4,000–7,000
12–20 hours
You need to look like a company by next month. A name exists; nothing else does.
- Logo — a mark that still reads at 16 px in a browser tab
- Colour, including the contrast pairs that pass accessibility
- Type: two families at most, licensed for the web, with a scale
- The files: SVG, PNG at every size, favicon.ico, social images
- A one-page usage note your developer can actually follow
Identity and design system
$9,000–18,000
25–50 hours
The brand has to survive a product with forty screens, half of them generated by an AI tool.
- Everything above, taken further and written down
- Design tokens — colour, spacing, type, radius, shadow — as code, not a PDF
- Components styled against those tokens, so screen nineteen looks like screen two
- Light and dark, decided rather than inverted
- Voice: how the product speaks in empty states, errors and confirmations
- OG and social images that render, because most do not
Brand and product, together
$20,000–40,000
60–110 hours
You are launching or repositioning, and the brand and the interface have to arrive at the same time.
- Everything above, applied across the product and the site
- Marketing site design, built to the same tokens
- Illustration or motion direction where the product needs it
- Pitch and sales material built from the same system
- A handover session with whoever maintains it next
These are typical ranges, not a price list. They are $300–$400 an hour — the rate on this site — multiplied by the hours a project of that size has actually taken us. The number for yours comes after the call, in writing, once we have read your brief.
What you end up holding
Files, code, and rules someone can follow without us
Every deliverable here is something your developer, your designer or your AI tool can use on a Tuesday afternoon without asking a question.
- The mark: SVG, plus PNG at every size anyone will ask for, plus the lockups
- favicon.ico with real 16, 32 and 48 px versions, apple-touch-icon and a web manifest
- Colour as tokens, with the contrast pairs that pass WCAG AA already worked out
- Type: families chosen with the web licence confirmed, with a scale rather than a list
- Light and dark, decided as two designs rather than one inverted
- OG and Twitter card images that actually render, at the sizes each platform crops to
- Design tokens as code — CSS custom properties or a theme file, whichever your stack uses
- Components built against those tokens, for the identity and system bands
- A usage note that is one page and answers the questions people actually ask
How it runs
Two to six weeks, and you see it early
01
Send the brief
What the company is, who it is for, and anything you already have — a moodboard, a competitor, a logo you dislike. Free.
02
A call
Thirty minutes on the company and the product. We tell you which band this is and what the number is likely to be.
03
Direction, not options
One direction argued for, with the reasoning, rather than three variations to pick from. Three options is a way of making the client decide; one with an argument is a position.
04
Applied to your actual product
The direction is shown on your real screens, not on a mock of a phone on a desk. That is where it either works or does not.
05
Built into tokens
The decisions become code. From here your team and your AI tool can apply the brand without interpreting it.
06
Handover
A session with whoever maintains it, and the files in a repository you own.
When this is the wrong thing to buy
- You want a full brand identity programme — naming, campaigns, print, environmental. That is a brand agency's job and we would point you at one.
- You need a logo by Friday for €200. Fiverr does that honestly and quickly, and for a pre-revenue side project it is often the right call.
- You want three directions to choose between. We argue for one; if picking from a lineup is what you want, a studio will serve you better.
- Your product has no users and no budget. The brand is not what is stopping you, and we would rather say so than take the money.
- You want it done without any of your time. This needs about four hours of yours across the project, and without them it will be somebody else's brand.
Why take this from an engineering company
Because we have shipped the brand and then had to maintain it
Fifteen products this team built and still operates, each one needing a mark, a palette, a type scale and a set of rules that survived hundreds of screens. Including this site, where the visual system is documented, the artwork is generated deterministically from the brand's own vocabulary, and the favicon exists because we learned the hard way what happens when it does not.
- 15
- products with a brand this team made and maintained
- 16px
- the size a mark actually has to work at
- AA
- the contrast standard every pair is checked against
- 1
- direction argued for, not three to choose between
Questions
Brand design, in detail
- Who actually does the design?
- Direction, decisions and the system are Nikola's — they are the parts that have to survive a codebase. Visual and production design comes from a designer he has worked with for years, named on the call before anything starts. You are not getting a bench of freelancers you never meet.
- Are you a brand agency?
- No, and the page says so rather than implying otherwise. We do brand for software companies: the identity and the system it has to live inside. Naming, campaigns, packaging and print are somebody else's craft and we will say so.
- Can you show brand work you have done?
- Our own fifteen products, and this site. We have no external brand case studies to point at, and inventing some would be easier than saying this. If that is a dealbreaker it is a reasonable one.
- We already have a logo. Can you work with it?
- Often the best answer, and it makes the essentials band cheaper. We keep the mark, fix what breaks in a product context — sizes, contrast, tokens, the missing files — and leave your recognition intact.
- Will this work with Lovable, v0 or Claude Code?
- It is one of the reasons to do it. Those tools produce generic interfaces because nobody gives them a system. Tokens, a type scale and component rules are exactly the input that makes the output look like your product.
- Do you do the marketing site too?
- In the largest band, yes — designed and built to the same tokens. Below that we hand over a system your developer can build it from.
- What if we do not like the direction?
- One revision round is in every band, and the direction is shown early on your real screens precisely so this comes up in week two rather than at the end. If it is still wrong after that, we say so and stop rather than iterating on your money.
Related
Product & system design
The product and the architecture, designed before it is built.
Product design & UX
The practice: research, prototypes, design systems.
Marketing strategy
Positioning and the material to launch a brand with.
Product partner
Product, design and engineering as one ongoing arrangement.
The products we build
Fifteen products this team designed and still operates.
Who runs Golux
The person accountable, and the collaborators behind him.
Send it over
Tell us what the company is
What you do, who it is for, and what you have already — a name, a logo you are unsure about, a moodboard, competitors you admire or cannot stand. Attach any of it.
Knowing what you do not want is as useful as knowing what you do, and it usually saves a whole round.
