Aa
Type & brand
4 pairings
Most designers learn product, brand, writing and AI as four separate things and never join them up. The free library below is where that starts — teardowns, systems and tools, no charge and no email required to read it.
The material is the same either way. What differs is the on-ramp, the pace, and whether you build on a supplied brief or your own client work.
Everything below is the free tier — a fair sample of how the paid system teaches. Specific, opinionated, no filler.
Four pairings we keep reaching for
A display face carries the personality and appears rarely. A body face carries the reading and appears everywhere. Problems start when both try to do both.
Ordered the way we actually use them: find a direction, test it against real text, then lock the values into tokens.
Generate and lock palettes fast when you have no starting point.
Drop a palette onto a live page layout before committing to it.
Machine-generated palettes tied to a layout, not floating swatches.
Harmony rules, plus extraction from an image or an existing brand.
Build accessible colour ramps by target contrast instead of by eye.
Test text and UI pairs against WCAG before the build starts.
Pick in a perceptual space so lightness steps look even to the eye.
See palettes applied to a full page, with roles already assigned.
The checklist we run a layout against before it leaves the studio. If a screen feels wrong and nobody can say why, the answer is usually on this page.
relationships between height, width and depth
distribution of visual weight across the frame
creating one clear centre of interest
parts coming together as one whole
the impression of action across a still frame
a unit repeated until it reads as a surface
different elements adding complexity to the work
opposite elements arranged together to grab attention
repetition with pace that pulls the eye onward
order of attention, decided before anything is styled
Note: the poster this grid is modelled on lists unity twice and omits hierarchy. We kept unity once and put hierarchy back in.
Two squircles, one gradient, one glass pass. The same recipe scales to a whole icon set once the frame sizes are fixed.
Draws connectors between frames so a flow stays readable while it changes.
Fills mockups with plausible names, avatars and dates instead of lorem.
Search across open icon sets and place them as editable vectors.
Contrast, focus order and vision simulation without leaving the file.
Finds detached styles and stray values before hand-off.
Selects every layer sharing a property, which makes bulk fixes survivable.
Rename or retune a whole set of text and colour styles at once.
Place licensed photography straight into a frame for early comps.
A project that needs a UI designer, an identity designer, a writer and someone who can direct a model is three contracts you don't control and three margins you don't keep. Covering all four is the whole difference between a freelancer and a studio.
The craft you already sell. On its own it caps your scope at the screen layer, which is the layer clients price hardest.
The layer that doubles a project's value and is almost always subcontracted out by product people.
The cheapest scope to add and the one clients notice first when it's missing. Rarely quoted, always needed.
The multiplier on the other three. It's what makes a one-week delivery honest instead of a promise you break.
This is a working designer's programme. It assumes you already have clients and a craft, and that the thing holding your rate down is scope, not skill.
Each part ends with something you can put in front of a client. You build on your own live project, not a fictional brief.
How to quote a full system instead of four line items, what to put in the proposal, and how to answer the client who asks why it costs more than a logo.
Marks, type, colour and tokens — built in the order clients actually approve them, so revisions land on decisions instead of taste.
Task maps through prototypes to a single file a developer can build from without a meeting. Where most solo projects lose a week.
Naming, microcopy, errors and empty states. The layer that costs you a day and reads to the client like the product got twice as considered.
Where a model saves you hours, where it quietly costs you the client, and the review path in between. Including what you tell clients you used.
The point of these is to remove work, not to pad a list.
Every claim here should be a real person with a real before and after. Placeholders stay until they are.
Before: what they sold and what they subcontracted. After: the scope they now deliver alone, and the first project where it held.
Use a specific project. A named client and a visible artefact beat any adjective you could write here.
Two or three projects you delivered this way, with the artefacts. Until students exist, your own record is the proof.
The operator cohort runs after the first Foundations group finishes, so it launches with real results behind it rather than promises. Waitlist members get the dates and the first-run price before anyone else.
Read the library. If it's useful, the Foundations beta is the next step — and the weekly teardown lands in your inbox either way.
The library above: type, colour, the principles checklist and the plugin stack.
Foundations: six weeks live, one finished portfolio project, 12 seats.
The operator programme, once the first cohort has results worth showing.
NEXT COHORT — ADD DATE · 12 SEATS