Chapter 3: Design System
5 min read · 1,107 words ·
I spent three days on the name.
Not three days of elegant deliberation. Three days of opening a blank document, typing something, closing the document, and not thinking about it until the next evening. The word "Nunlimited" showed up on day two, in a notes app, between a reminder to book a dentist appointment and a half-drafted email I never sent.
It stuck because it does what I wanted: it's mine (it's my name), it says something about the ambition (unlimited), and it's a bit stupid in a way I'm comfortable with. Names that are a bit stupid are often the ones people remember.
Why brand matters before you think it should
I didn't want to spend time on brand. I wanted to spend time on content.
That's the wrong way to think about it, and I knew it was the wrong way to think about it even while I was doing it. Brand isn't decoration. It's the thing that makes the same words feel different depending on where they appear. If you don't decide what you look like, you'll look like everything else — which, in a crowded space, is the same as looking like nothing.
Enterprise sales content online has a look. LinkedIn blue. Serif headings. Stock photography of handshakes. That is not the look I wanted.
What I wanted was something that felt like code. Engineered. Systematic. The visual equivalent of the positioning — because if the brand is "Sales Source Code", the design language should feel like a source file, not a brochure.
The two layers
There are two distinct visual systems in this build. They're intentionally different, because they're doing different jobs.
Nunlimited is the parent brand. It's what I — as a creator — live under. Pink to coral gradient, dark backgrounds, a typography system built on Outfit. It's warmer than SSC, more personal, more direct. It's the thing that shows up on a cover image or a profile page and says "this is a person, not a faceless business."
Sales Source Code is the product layer. It has a completely separate design language: dark terminal windows, cyan accent (#22d3ee), JetBrains Mono for display, Inter for body text. It looks like a developer tool, not a course. That's deliberate — the audience is enterprise sales professionals, not general business coaches, and the design signals that difference before a single word is read.
Getting these two to coexist without one undermining the other took a bit of work. The answer was strict separation: Nunlimited appears on brand assets, profile pages, and the build-in-public series. SSC appears on products, PDFs, and course materials. They're related by tone, not by colour.
The colour decisions
For Nunlimited, I wanted pink. Specifically #ff1f7a — a saturated, attention-grabbing pink that pairs with a coral gradient (#ff9a6c). On dark backgrounds it pops. It's also not a colour you see much in the enterprise space, which is partly the point.
An earlier version of the brand used purple. Deep, slightly violet purple. It looked fine. It didn't feel right. Purple in tech has a lot of associations — crypto, AI tools, SaaS products from 2021. I wanted something with less baggage. Pink is bold in a way purple isn't, and bold is appropriate when you're a one-person operation trying to be noticed.
For SSC, the accent is cyan. A specific, deliberate cyan: #22d3ee. In the context of dark terminal backgrounds, it reads as code — as something that means something, not as decoration. It's the colour of a cursor, a prompt, a live value. That association is intentional.
The typography choices
Nunlimited: Outfit. It's a geometric sans-serif with a bit of warmth — not as cold as Inter, not as expressive as something like Fraunces. At 800 weight it headlines well; at 400 it reads cleanly in body copy. It's available on Google Fonts, which matters for a low-overhead operation where I'm not managing typeface licences.
SSC: JetBrains Mono for display and headers, Inter for body. The mono font is doing heavy lifting here — it signals code, precision, the engineering-first positioning. Paired with Inter (which is readable and neutral), the combination gives the documents a terminal-meets-textbook feel that I think suits the content.
One rule that applies across both systems: never pure black on pure white. The contrast is too harsh, and it flattens everything. SSC uses off-white text on near-black backgrounds; Nunlimited uses off-white text on deep navy. The difference is subtle but it matters.
The logo
The Nunlimited logo is an N lettermark. Pink to coral gradient, transparent background, 1000×1000px. Simple. The gradient makes it pop on dark surfaces; the transparency means it works on anything.
There's also an infinity mark — a separate asset, not the primary logo. I mention this because I initially mixed them up in the file system and spent twenty minutes wondering why the logo looked wrong.
The SSC brand doesn't have a logo in the traditional sense. It has a wordmark: <SSC/> in JetBrains Mono, cyan. It looks like a code tag. That is the brand doing what it's supposed to do.
What I built it with
The design assets live in Canva. The PDFs are built with WeasyPrint, using HTML and CSS with named page rules. Fonts are loaded via file:// URIs because WeasyPrint doesn't have network access — you quickly discover this the first time a build silently falls back to Arial.
Cover images are self-contained HTML files rendered to 1280×720. The workflow for producing them is: write HTML, open in browser, screenshot, upload to Gumroad. It's not elegant, but it's reproducible and it costs nothing.
For someone with four to seven hours a week, "costs nothing and is reproducible" is more valuable than "looks like it was made by a studio."
What the design system actually solves
The point of having a design system — even a simple one — is that you don't have to make the same decisions twice. Every time I need to produce something new, the colour values are documented, the fonts are set, the pattern for a cover image exists. The design debt is zero because the decisions are already made.
That's worth spending three days on at the start. It buys you back time on every single thing you produce afterwards.
Chapter 4 is about hardening the whole thing for launch: what "production-ready" looks like when the system is one person, a handful of cloud tools, and an infrastructure budget under thirty pounds a month.
Ta,
James
Founder | Nunlimited
