One of the first things we do when we start a company is design a logo and a website. It usually costs money and needs a designer. But a brand is so much more than a logo and a website — and today, you can have the whole thing instantly, as long as you know what you want.
When I started Clear Books I paid a designer to create a logo and a website, and it looked pretty cool. But that was the entirety of our “brand” for the first few years. Sound familiar? Only later did I realise how powerful it is to have a proper brand system — a style guide, a design language, a set of rules to keep everything consistent.
Because without consistency you end up with drift.
Different fonts. Different sizes. Different slogans. Different colours. Different buttons, tables, spacing, alignment — a visual mess that compounds.
By the time I started Countingup I knew better. Before raising a penny I worked with a designer to define the logo, colour palette, fonts, spacing — the whole lot — and put it into a style guide. As the company grew, the design team extended that into a full product design system covering every UI component.
With TinyTax, apart from picking the name and our brand green, I wasn’t on top of the brand from day one. The focus was product, product, product. But after shipping some major product changes, today I finally had the time to address the brand properly.
Or rather, my Tiny Coders did.
By the end of the day, tinytax.co.uk/brand existed — our logo, colour system, typography, spacing rules, component styling, and examples. A whole brand system built in a day, and without paying a penny.
Starting a company in 2025 is wild. The things that used to take weeks of back-and-forth now take hours. And sometimes, like today, they take one afternoon.