Brand & UI Designer

About the role

Brand UI Designer

We're a Canadian software company building accounting and payroll software for small businesses and the accountants who serve them — a genuine alternative to QuickBooks, built here, with data that stays in Canada.

The product is built and running: invoicing, expenses, CRA-accurate payroll, sales tax for every province, bank reconciliation, inventory, and a full practice product for accounting firms. We're in private preview with launch preparation underway, with advisory support from a Big Four firm.

What we don't have yet is a visual identity worthy of it. That's this contract.

The Engagement

You'll define how the product looks — across a 25-page marketing site, the product itself, and everywhere the brand appears.

This is a visual-led engagement. We're not looking for a researcher or a wireframe specialist. We're looking for someone whose work makes people stop scrolling, and who can hold that quality across an entire system rather than one beautiful hero.

A real problem waiting on day one: we're running two marks — a wordmark on the marketing site and an unrelated badge as the app icon. That split was a deliberate "wait for a real designer" decision. Resolving it into one coherent system is yours to own.

Scope — you tell us. Bid whichever tier fits:

Polish pass. Keep the identity and layout; refine typography, spacing, components, imagery and micro-interactions. Deliver a tightened token set.

Visual redesign. Keep the brand core; rebuild the visual system so the whole thing feels new.

Full rebrand. Everything on the table — mark, palette, typography, the works. Must still work across site, product and app-store icons.

Fee

We contract this as a project fee, not an hourly rate — identity work isn't billable by the hour, and we'd rather buy an outcome than a timesheet.

Tell us what the work is worth for the tier you're bidding and how long it takes. For context, senior freelance work of this kind typically lands around C$8–25k depending on scope. We're open across that range.

What you'd deliver

A design system in Figma: colour tokens, type scale, spacing, and a component library our engineers implement from directly

Page templates across the site, plus product screens that sit in the same family

A brand recommendation resolving the two-mark question, with favicon, app-icon and social-card assets

A short usage guide for our engineering team — we implement in-house, so no code required from you, though token naming that maps to CSS variables is appreciated

What we're looking for

A portfolio showing range and taste — brand systems and interface work

Evidence you can carry a visual system across many pages and states without it falling apart

Figma fluency, and design-system thinking that survives handoff

Comfort designing for two very different audiences at once: small-business owners who need clarity and reassurance, and accountants who need depth and credibility

Constraints you'd design within — we think these make the work more interesting, not less:

Accessibility is not optional. WCAG AA contrast minimum on all text. The site passes today and won't go backwards.

Bilingual by design. A French version is coming under Québec's Bill 96 — layouts must survive strings around 20% longer.

Honest by default. No invented claims, and no fake dashboards showing numbers the product doesn't produce. Real product UI is available to use.

Familiarity sells switching. Users are migrating from QuickBooks and FreshBooks. Distinctive is good; disorienting is not.

Trust is the product. This software holds people's books. Nothing should feel flimsy.

Nice to have

Fintech, SaaS or another category where trust is the product; motion and micro-interaction work; bilingual (English/French).

Process

Proposal — which tier you'd bid, your take on the direction, portfolio, fee and timeline.

Conversation — a short working call. We'll talk through your own work and how you'd approach ours.

Shortlist — the full brief, the company name, access to the private review site, and the terms of the concept stage.

Build-out and handoff — the winning direction expands to the full deliverables, with two structured feedback rounds, then Figma and a usage guide to engineering.

To apply, send:

A link to your portfolio — live URLs, not a PDF deck.

One project shown as a system. Point us at work where we can see the system behind it — multiple pages or screens holding together — not a single hero shot.

One paragraph: pick a screen or page from your own portfolio and tell us a decision you'd now make differently, and why.

That last one matters more to us than a cover letter. We're looking for someone who can defend and revisit their own choices, and we'll be asking about it on the call.