Makelight

Makelight was a passion project that turned into a bootstrapped e-learning business. Emily ran the courses and the community; I was the sole developer and designer, and built everything the business ran on: landing pages, funnel analytics, adaptive remarketing, a course CMS, payments and subscriptions, a partly automated newsletter system, activity feeds, retention flows and member administration. The Instagram analytics tool I built for it, Insights, later became Year of Colour.

I did the brand as well, and it is some of the design work I am most fond of. The mark is a camera aperture inside a square with eight petals radiating out, so it reads as a flower and as a camera at the same time.

The identity turned into surfaces: a seamless line pattern built from the logo's petals and loops, and a scallop field in about forty colours for The Pattern, a project in its own right.

The product was drawn in the same language: the course grid, the one-page explainer for Insights, and the architecture of the analytics platform, set in the brand's own typography.

Then the month-to-month material: a Pinterest pin for the visual storytelling course, and the monthly photo prompt sheets.

The earlier identity, from the Makelight Retreat in 2015, was a handwritten script. It dates the moment the brand changed.