Product, Website, Branding · 2026
Simple Use Software
Founder · Brand, design system, product and AI-assisted build · 2026
My software studio, built to make complex systems usable by the people who run them. I designed the brand and wrote the Product Bible every screen follows, then built the website, an office portal for clients, quotes, proposals and support, and a quote tool.
Project story
The business
I built Simple Use Software from the ground up. Its main service is a website redesign in as little as one week, with the client's content and address kept, and it also makes SaaS. A free checkup covers design, SEO and the cookie banner, with a separate SEO audit and a privacy and cookie audit.
The cookie banner is built into the website. It asks first, keeps optional cookies off until the visitor says yes, and the footer's Cookie preferences button brings it back.
The identity
The brand began as an identity plan: six core colors led by SU Blue and Deep Navy, Montserrat in three weights, and a voice that is plain, warm, confident, patient and honest. A brand guidelines booklet records it.
The Product Bible, in six volumes, covers foundations, voice and audience, a plain English engine, an analogy library, the design system and products in practice.
Logo design
The monogram is a double-stroke S U S in a rounded square, drawn as one continuous line in the house blue. The logo ships as eight outlined SVG files, lockups, monograms and a tile, so it never depends on a font.
Tools used
TypeScript, Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Lucide, Turborepo, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare, Anthropic, Resend, Stripe, Vercel, Cheerio, Astro, Zod, GitHub Actions
Tools listed here were used across the project.
The work
The dashboard I built for the back office. Four counts and the newest client events are read fresh on every visit, never cached, under database rules that let only an admin see them.
Portal analytics with no outside tracker. My own Cloudflare Worker records a cookieless row each time a client preview portal is opened, and the office counts unique and returning visitors, clicks, referrers, countries, cities, devices and browsers from those rows. The client's name is blurred here.
A CRM with one record per client email. A saved quote is never left without a client: it links to the one it came from or finds or creates one by email. Each client moves from new lead to active client, and lifetime value counts only money actually collected. Client details are blurred here.
The quote engine. From a website address it crawls the pages in the site's menu, detects the platform and paid features, and prices the redesign from one pricing table that every dollar in the app comes from. The proposal becomes a contract whose text is hashed, so any change after sending makes a new version, then a PDF and Stripe payments for the deposit and the final half.
My own consent platform: a cookie banner, script blocker and consent record, installed with one script tag. Optional scripts stay switched off until the visitor says yes, and stay off even if the banner never loads. It honors Global Privacy Control, keeps an anonymous record of each choice, can pass the choice to Google tags, and asks everyone again when the policy changes.
The SEO engine behind the free checkup and this queue. Each request runs in the background on a Cloudflare Worker: 13 modules check the site, from technical and content to schema, Google PageSpeed and AI search readiness, and seven weigh into one score out of 100 with a fix for each finding. A research step adds the domain record, DNS and email security, the certificate and a 20-page crawl. The site and owner are blurred.
The cookie scan, a source-only check. It loads a page once, with no browser and without running the site's scripts, finds known tracking tools in the page's code and reads the cookies the site sets before anyone has said yes, so it cannot see what scripts do once a browser runs them. Only analytics, advertising, marketing and tag tools count as trackers, and private or internal addresses are refused. Requesters are blurred here.
Support at a glance. Each ticket has a first reply deadline set by its priority: 1 hour for urgent, 4 hours for high, 24 for normal and 48 for low, and any ticket past it without a reply is counted as breaching.
The help desk. Numbered tickets carry a status, priority, category and assignee; agents reply to the customer or leave notes only agents can read, every change is logged in the thread, and files up to 15 MB go to private storage that only the ticket's owner or an admin can open.
Brand Guidelines
Version 3.1, October 2026. Open a volume to read every page.
Simple Use Software: Brand Guidelines
Product Bible
6 volumes, version 3. Open a volume to read every page.
Volume I: Foundations
Volume II: Voice & Audience
Volume III: The Plain English Engine
Volume IV: The Analogy Library
Volume V: The Design System
Volume VI: Products in Practice
