Service · Brand and design systems
A brand that survives contact with a small team.
A design system is the set of decisions that lets people who are not designers publish work that still looks like you. In Fair Light builds them in Figma for companies with a real brand and nobody whose job is protecting it.
What it is
What is the difference between a brand guide and a design system?
A brand guide is a document about your brand. A design system is the working parts: the actual type styles, colour variables, spacing scale and components, bound together so the correct decisions are the easy ones. A guide asks people to remember. A system means they do not have to.
✓
A type scale with real, named text styles
✓
Colour as bound variables, not hex codes pasted in
✓
A spacing scale on a consistent grid
✓
Components for the things you make constantly
✓
Written rules for the decisions a file cannot enforce
The gap between those two things is where brand consistency dies. Nobody sets out to publish a slide that looks wrong.
Brand guide
Design system
What it is
A document about your brand
The working parts: type styles, colour variables, spacing scale and components
Colour
Hex codes pasted in
Bound variables, not pasted in
Type
Described in a document
Real, named text styles
What it asks of your team
Remember it
They do not have to
Scoped per project · Built in Figma · Designed and built in Webflow where the work extends to the site
How it works
What does building one involve?
We start by reading what you already have. Then we build it, and the last step is testing it, by building real work on it.
1
Read what you have
Most companies have more of a brand than they think, scattered across a good deck, one landing page somebody cared about, and a logo with rules nobody wrote down.
2
Build the system
A type scale with named styles, colour as bound variables, a spacing scale on a consistent grid, and components for the things you make constantly.
3
Test it
Nothing gets freehanded, because a value typed by hand is a value that drifts. The last step is using it: building real work on the system.
What if we do not have a brand yet?
Then that comes first: identity, type, colour, and the reasoning behind them. We have taken projects from a name and an idea through to a complete visual world, including how it behaves in motion and how it holds up at fifteen seconds on a phone.
Who is this for?
Companies with a real brand, recurring things to publish, and a design team of one or none. It is not for organisations with an internal design function that already owns this.
In practice that means marketing teams of one to three, and founders who keep rebuilding the same deck from scratch.
Who this is for
Marketing teams of one to three, and founders who keep rebuilding the same deck from scratch.
What do you get?
A Figma file that works, with variables and components bound rather than described, plus written rules for the decisions a file cannot enforce. Where the work extends to the site, we design and build in Webflow.
Straight answers
Figma to Webflow
The system you approve in Figma is the system that ships.
Is In Fair Light just one person?
It is led by one person, with a longtime collaborator and specialists brought in when a project calls for one. That is not a caveat. You are paying for direction and for the edit, not for overhead, and you are talking to the person doing the work.
Do you build the website too?
Where the work extends to the site, we design and build in Webflow, so the system you approve in Figma is the system that ships. If you have a development team, we hand over the file and the rules instead.
How much does it cost?
It depends on what the thing actually is, so we scope it on the first call and you have the full number before anything starts. Two revision rounds are included on everything. We will also tell you when a smaller project would do the job, which happens more often than you would expect.
How much of my time will this take?
Very little, and that is deliberate. The first conversation, your feedback once you have seen the visual direction, and two rounds of review. In between we go quiet and build, and you review finished thinking rather than half-finished questions.
Do you work in French?
Yes. Alex is from Québec and works natively in both languages, including scripts, narration and correspondence.
Elsewhere on the site
Not sure which lane you need?
Bring the project. Deciding which is which is the first thing we do together.
Get in touch
Does everything you publish look slightly different?
Send us the last five things you made. We will tell you whether the problem is the brand, the file, or neither.