Building a Brand and a Product From Zero
Challenge: Element14 was a brand new government advisory startup with its first major opportunity: a grant application to fund a rural community grant discovery product. There was no brand, no product, and no promotional materials. I needed to build all three fast enough to support the application.
My Role: Founding designer at Element14. I initiated and owned everything from brand identity and logo through product UX, UI, and a grant application video.
Team Structure: Founding Designer (me), Element14 Founder, Engineer, CEO
Impact: Established the company’s brand and built a live product in North Carolina quickly scaling to 500+ municipalities and 74 pre-screened federal programs with a grant application video - all produced to support Element14's first product launch as a startup.
Summary: When I came on as Element14's founding designer, there was no brief, no brand, and no products. Just a founder with a sharp understanding of a broken system across government services. In pulling me in they wanted help starting the company but also building and launching their first product in time for a grant application billions. The goal of the product was to connect billions in federal grants going unclaimed to small towns that didn't have the capacity to navigate the application landscape. My job was to build the company identity, build the product, and create the promotional materials that would make the case to funders.
designing the brand to build trust and confidence in the products and services
Building the start up From Zero
The first problem wasn't the product - it was credibility. A brand new startup asking funders to trust it with a grant application needed an identity that signaled it was serious before a single feature was described.
I started with positioning. Most boutique government advisory firms lead with pedigree - firm names, political administrations, credentials. But because we were a small firm I wanted to push for a different direction: lead with identity, not pedigree. The firm was genuinely lean and genuinely senior. "Private Sector Speed. Public Sector Purpose." was the line that landed after working through a dozen alternatives - it names the actual differentiator without claiming credentials the firm didn't have yet.
The logo use went through multiple explorations - location pin marks, abstract wayfinding forms, wordmark-only approaches - before arriving at the final mark. The visual system needed to work in a federal context (credible, not flashy) while still reading as a product company, not a consulting firm.
The problem we wanted to start with
With the Business now solidified I moved in to build out our first independent product - a passion project the CEO had started digging into as he had moved back to the rural town where he had grown up. He had found that over 1,000 federal programs exist to fund water systems, roads, broadband, and housing but most small towns never apply - not because they don't qualify, but because the system takes expertise they can't afford. Small towns rarely have a grants office. The one person who might apply is the same person managing the water system, answering phones, and attending every council meeting. Funding Finder was built for that person - to give them a fighting chance in an hour, not a consultant and six months.
The product was focused on the key insight that rural officials think in projects, not in funding categories. A town manager doesn't wake up asking which federal programs they qualify for. They wake up knowing the water system needs an upgrade and the sidewalks are broken.
The Product Branding
Funding Finder's visual identity was built around a single governing idea: federal grant systems feel cold, bureaucratic, and out of reach - so the design had to feel like the opposite. The brand's warm amber-orange was chosen deliberately to signal approachability and civic warmth rather than the navy-and-grey institutional palette most government-adjacent tools default to.
The town line-drawing illustration - a hand-drawn skyline of churches, water towers, fire trucks, and storefronts - anchors the hero and does more brand communication than any copy on the page. it says immediately and wordlessly that this tool was built for your town, not for a federal agency. Micro-animations were used sparingly and purposefully.
Typography pairs a humanist serif for headlines - conveying credibility and warmth - with a clean sans-serif for functional UI copy, keeping the tool readable and trustworthy without feeling sterile. Every visual decision was in service of one brief: make a first-generation grant applicant in a town of 800 people feel like the system was designed for them.
The product design
Discover. Community search by town or county. Plain-language project description. The tool maps it to grant categories without exposing the jargon.
Prioritize. The user ranks what matters to them: funding amount, deadline urgency, match requirements, technical assistance availability. This turns 74 programs into a personal shortlist without requiring any grant expertise.
Match. Results with a visual match score, deadline countdowns, and save-for-later.
Apply. Auto-generated Letter of Interest pre-filled with the town's data and the program's framing language. Copy email-ready or download. No comparable tool offers this.
The Grant Application
Alongside the product, I produced the video that would anchor Element14's grant application. The video had to do the same work as the product design: make a complex, fragmented system feel legible and solvable, without oversimplifying it into something unrecognizable to the people who live inside it. I anchored on a real life user’s story bringing to life just how problematic it is when funds go to one program but are still inaccessible to citizens because other underfunded programs become obstacles to it.