Maven Brand Build
Intro
Maven is a strategic consultancy founded by Shannon King, helping female-focused brands earn the trust that turns passing interest into real growth. It came to me as a name and a sharp point of view — no logo, no colours, no website. I designed the brand identity and the full website, then built and shipped it in Framer.
Year
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2026
Client
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Maven | Shannon King
The challenge
A BRAND ABOUT TRUST THAT HAD TO EMBODY IT
Maven's whole philosophy is that trust is earned, never demanded — no urgency, no pressure. The identity had to work the same way: warm, calm, and quietly confident.
The brief set a hard tonal needle to thread: warm but sharp, feminine but not soft, premium but not corporate — while explicitly ruling out every easy default, from navy consulting blue to millennial pink, florals and cold minimalism. And as a brand-new practice growing into a full-time consultancy, Maven had to look established from day one — across web, documents, cards and social — with no existing equity to lean on.
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The approach
TRANSLATE THE POSITIONING INTO A DESIGN LANGUAGE
I distilled Maven's personality — warm, considered, sharp, honest — into a concrete, ownable design system, then carried it all the way to a live site the founder could run herself.
1. The identity
A characterful, high-contrast display serif carries the "Meet Maven" wordmark, with a compact "ML" monogram for the header, social avatar and favicon. The palette is warm and lived-in — dusty pink for warmth, olive-moss for grounding and edge, cream for editorial calm, charcoal for text, and a teal accent. An editorial serif pairs with a condensed uppercase grotesque; the tension between the two — elegant and plain-spoken — is the brand's personality in a single system. For imagery, I developed a "vintage postcard, mid-century-modern" direction into a system of vintage black-and-white and warm retro photography, so the homepage signals female-focused and editorial at a glance.
The solution cont.
2. The website
I designed the site in Figma and built it in Framer, so Maven launched with a live, editable site rather than a static mockup. The homepage leads with restraint — a full-bleed vintage image, an oversized serif wordmark, and room to breathe; no CTA crowds the hero, so the brand earns attention rather than demanding it. The Work With Me page lays out three service tiers and the signature "Shift Report" in a clear comparison table, and every page carries the warm, low-pressure voice of the copy. I licensed the display typeface and photography properly and QA'd across breakpoints, so nothing breaks on any screen size.
The process
EXPLORE WIDELY, THEN CONVERGE
I started by interrogating the brief and its references, then produced a visual-direction document the whole build ran from — palette, type, spacing, button styles, and homepage layout. From there I explored broadly before committing: several palette directions (coral, teal, deep green, dusty pink), multiple typeface routes, and many homepage compositions, before converging on the warm dusty-pink, olive and cream world the brand lives in today.
The process cont.
A REAL PARTNERSHIP, NOT A HANDOVER
The work ran as a genuine collaboration: a visual-direction review followed by three design reviews, in-tool comment cycles, and shared asset folders. Shannon's imagery instinct and my design system met in the middle — decisions made together, quickly, with clear rationale on both sides.
The process cont. - Handoff and launch
BUILT FOR THE FOUNDER'S INDEPENDENCE
I built the handoff so Shannon left fully self-sufficient: a complete brand guidelines and design-system document, site ownership transferred to her, and a guided migration from Squarespace to Framer — domain port, social preview image and SEO settings included. She finished the engagement able to run and update Maven entirely on her own.
What's next?
What's next?
With the brand and site live, the next chapter is growth: extending the vintage-editorial imagery system across new touchpoints, building out Shannon's newsletter presence, and evolving Maven from a side practice into a full-time consultancy — with an identity built to scale alongside it.
Next work
