Brand + Web Designer. Founder BrightStudios®. Open for projects. Clients: @contra @magicpathai @dazn @bolt. BRIGHTMethod newsletter
Web concept for bem. The product turns messy documents into structured data, so the brand does the same thing visually. Every image dissolves into pixels, every layout resolves back into grid.
Most designers want “more clients.”
Nick from BakedDesign hit 170–180K/month in his studio… and realized too many clients nearly broke him. In our upcoming UnContrad conversation, we go deep on:
- Burnout signs he ignored at Meta
- Why he caps revenue around 100–120K/month
- How he rebuilt around freedom, not vanity metrics
This episode might change how you think about “growth.”
Portugal's FA shipped a new logo mid world cup.
by the end of the week: it will never appear on the shirt. institutional use only. players keep the old crest.
an identity is proven by the surfaces it's allowed on. exempt the highest-stakes one and you've admitted the brand can't carry you.
b2b runs the same retreat quietly. new site ships, sales keeps the old deck "until the quarter closes," product waits for the redesign. two brands in market, and the old one owns every surface where money changes hands.
the exemption is the confession.
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Finom raised €115M in June 2025.
The rebrand shipped in July 2026.
Their own announcement says why: growth and new investment created "the need for self-definition." They knew for a year.
Nothing on your site gets worse when you raise. The reader changes. The same site that read scrappy at Series B reads underinvested at Series C.
I wrote the decision rule: when a post-raise rebrand pays, when it wastes the round, real costs, real timing.
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It's been a crazy week for me, and only now I really got the chance to play around with some @framer Agent and shaders. This is what I came up with using Claude as the main engine to prompt the idea I have for these funky monochrome shaders and the execution in Framer.
One of my favorite recent identities
Brand Guidelines ready for Bem
two years ago I was charging less than a grand for a website.
this week I crossed $960k on Contra.
same hands and same tools but the thing that really changed is I stopped charging for my time and started charging for what the work is worth to the company.
took me way too long to get this however when you bill hourly you're basically punishing yourself for getting good, you spend years getting faster and cleaner and the reward is you make less for the same result which makes no sense.
and half the time you're designing for a company that's about to raise millions, you're a big part of why they look fundable in the first place. charging that by the hour like it's a favor never sat right with me.
so at some point you just say the number, not a random one though. sit down, figure out what each thing is actually worth to you, write it down, then say it out loud without doing the nervous little discount thing we all do.
the pricing was never the hard part but believing I was worth it was and I'm still working on that some days, however the number's finally catching up to the work.
anyway, road to a million, one project at a time. the count's live on my Contra profile if you want to watch it happen.
been doing this since i was 18 and i still get this before big calls.
you grow faster than you expect and suddenly you're on a kickoff with a company you respect, they're treating you like the expert and your brain's going "they think there's a team back here, it's just me and my dog"
for years i read that as proof i wasn't ready and it took me forever to realize the feeling isn't a fact but the work jumped a level and the picture in my head never caught up.
it never goes away, but I stop treating it as it is and take it as something that's just a signal of me always pushing forward.
I've been a little skeptical of the ai builders add-ons. because a lot of brands show you one thing in the promo, and then when you try it out yourself, it's pretty useless.
But Framer 3.0 is the first one that actually, surprised me for the better, and I didn't come out just okay with it.
I was pretty blown away by the results, since I barely needed to change anything about them.across three different projects this week, I used it to rename layers redefine assets, help me optimize the sites, fill out placeholders, help me with configuring assets, components, and a CMS library.
And the best part was that after I went to check all the changes, it was close to perfect.
I'm so surprised, and I really wish more companies did the same thing and same execution.
I've been living in Framer 3.0 since the agents dropped last week, and here's where I landed. It will build the whole site for you now, including pages, CMS, copy, meta tags, code components, and even the boring link and accessibility audit nobody wants to do. And it's working on your actual live project, not some mockup you rebuild after. So the website kind of just got easy.
But here's the part no one is saying. Everything it took over is work that has a right answer. The layouts, the responsive passes, the alt text, that was never the thing that made a brand worth anything. It's trained to please you, so it hands you the safest, most middle-of-the-road version of your category every time. Great for alt text, but rough for the one line on your homepage that's supposed to make somebody go, “oh, these people actually get it.”
So I let it build. The thinking stays with me: the positioning, the message, the one risky call a model would never make on its own. Then Branching lets
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Quick road to a million update. I'm at 945K on Contra now and 10 grand of next month is already booked without me sending a single new offer.
For ages this felt like starting from zero every single month. What fixed it wasn't more outreach. It was treating my clients like an investment portfolio.
Retainers are my index funds. Not flashy but they pay every month no matter what. One off projects are my growth stocks where one might be 9K and the next might be 20K but you never really know what's coming.
The whole move is running both and finding the balance that lets you stop stressing.
Full breakdown in this week's episode.
Great convo with @Ryan Hayward on the UnContrad podcast!
He turned ONE free Framer template (given away on Twitter at midnight) into @Insert Frame , a 10-person product + education studio.
His advice for designers in the AI era: "Build your own doors. Don't knock on them."
Watch the full episode here:
A beautiful branding project we worked on for Anovia, designing a new brand identity for them, which then translated into a website design and development in Framer
Wow, already using the agent for some good use and saved me a ton of finicky work that I always hate doing.
Love the implementation @Framer
Hey everyone on the framer community, nice to meet you all! I'm Daniel a creative designer and I do brand and web design. You might have seen me around on Contra, X or Linkedin. Happy to be here and connect with everyone.
Everyone's asking if AI will replace designers.
Wrong question. Ask what AI is built to do.
It takes everything people have already made and hands you the most agreeable version of it. Trained to please the average person, so it always drifts to the middle.
That's the catch. AI nails the stuff most people would nod at.
Taste is the opposite. Picking the thing most people won't, because you know it's right. A machine can't do that. It's got nothing on the line.
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