Brand Identity & Visual System Designer — Construction-Intelligence Startup

We're an early-stage company building the intelligence infrastructure that makes complex physical projects knowable — for the construction industry, starting with high-end general contractors and the teams who run their projects. The brand has to hold two things at once. One is scale: infrastructure for an entire industry, and eventually the entire built world. The other is intimate — a builder home for dinner with nothing else needing him tonight. Most brands in our space pick one: sterile enterprise tech, or rugged-trade nostalgia. We need both, living in one system. Holding that tension is the design problem we're hiring against. What we're hiring for A brand identity and visual system for the parent company — wordmark, type, color, motion principles, and the rules that make it a system rather than a logo. Plus the design of our marketing website. One hard constraint: the system must be name-agnostic and extensible. The product wordmark is a deliberate fast-follow — so you're not designing a single mark, you're designing a system that absorbs a product mark cleanly when it lands. Scope: 1. Company identity: wordmark, type system, color, core visual language 2. Brand system and guidelines a small team can actually run with 3. Photography art direction and usage guidelines — grade, subject matter, and when (and when not) imagery appears 4. Marketing website design (we may handle front-end build in-house — tell us your stack and whether build interests you) This is open exploration. Once we're talking, we'll share our brand foundation — the story, positioning, and principles we've already locked — under a quick NDA, so you're designing from a clear point of view, not guessing. What we won't hand you is a prior visual direction. We've explored internally and we're deliberately keeping it out of your way: we want your convergence, not ours. You probably: - Build brand systems, not just logos — and can walk us through the thinking - Work comfortably in restraint; you can make "quiet" feel premium and alive, not empty - Have real opinions about type and can defend them - Move fast in short loops and would rather show work than present decks To apply: Portfolio — we care most about identities and systems, less about one-off graphics 3–4 sentences on how you'd hold those two halves — scale and intimacy — in one system Your rate, availability, and rough timeline to a first identity direction Rate: $75–$125/hr, Expert level. Open to a fixed first milestone for the initial identity direction if you prefer. You'll work in tight iterative loops directly with our commercial lead, from a brand foundation that's already written. We're keeping our name off the public post for now — we'll introduce ourselves the moment a conversation looks promising. If that sounds right, send the above and skip the long cover letter.