A startup that looked funded from day one
Brand identity and product design for a payments startup — built in six weeks, ready for investors and users.
Paylo, a payments startup entering the Uzbek market, had working technology, a licence in progress, and eight weeks of runway to a critical investor round. What it didn't have: a name, a face, or a product interface.
Build a complete brand and product design system fast enough for the round — but good enough that nothing would need to be thrown away after it.
Brand and product were designed as one system from the first sketch: the identity's geometry became the interface's grid, the brand's voice became the product's microcopy. Nothing was decoration.
We shipped a working design system, not a brand book: tokens, components, and templates the engineering team could build from directly, with the pitch materials generated from the same system.
Forty components, two themes, both languages, every state — delivered as code-connected tokens, so the product the investors saw in the deck is pixel-identical to the product that shipped.