Five words that no designer wants to hear on their second day in a new job.
Company websites collect things. Undercooked ideas, old strategies, pages that were supposed to be temporary. Somewhere underneath it all, a brand identity stretched into shapes nobody intended.
But, hey. Every company wants a new website. Light is no exception.
So, on my second day, I got started with my design peers and our brand team, bringing the new identity to our company's shop window. Two weeks later, we had a new website. All 1,800 pages of it.
in the job when the work on the new website started
to bring the new identity to the whole site
pages, built from one shared set of components
How we did it
Light brings together a financial core, apps and an agent workforce. We're building the last piece of finance software a growing business needs, and the website needed to match that ambition.
Our co-founder and CEO, Jonathan, calls the wider shift the Great SaaS Flattening. Work that once needed a separate tool, subscription and specialist can now happen through a person, an agent and a shared repository. We're applying that thinking to our own work, including the website.
Out went the WYSIWYG CMS and plugins; in came a shared codebase, brand principles and our expanding company-wide context repository.
The system
For us, AI is for systems, not slop. Design still happens in Figma, and copy in Google Docs. The team had been developing the story, copy and brand fundamentals in the background before I joined. My job was to bring that work to life on the web, with the LLM functioning like scaffolding to get the site's structure up far quicker.
AI is for systems, not slop.
We brought the assets and the logic for using them into one GitHub repository, giving us a shared set of components to build with across the site. That's what allowed us to take the identity across 1,800 pages in two weeks, with brand and product design working through the details together.
The brand
Before I joined, Rui, who's been designing our brand, Luke, our VP of Marketing, and Jakub, our man with the camera, had developed the new brand around "built for builders". We rebranded to reflect how we see finance people: unsung heroes who deserve more time and better tools to shape their business, without getting buried in the daily schlep. My job was to bring that identity to the web.
The logo and illustrations use a grid and building blocks inspired by Conway's Game of Life. They're modular, with room to combine and keep growing, just like the organic software we're building. That gives the idea of building a visual language.
The European and Bauhaus influences bring an emphasis on useful, simple design. On the site, that means clear layouts and editorial typography, with black-and-white photography and lava orange to stress a point or show some character.
We build in public at Light, so the site will keep changing. Next comes bringing the brand to life beyond the website. We'll share more of that work soon.
