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Brand identity
Naming through to a finished system — marks, type, colour and the rules that keep them consistent once I hand over.
Taking projects from MarchMaya Oyelaran
Brand &Product Designer
Brand and product design for companies that make something real — serving London, United Kingdom and specializing in Brand identity, Product design, Packaging.
12
Years designing
47
Products shipped
9
Countries worked in
31
Repeat clients
I trained as an industrial designer and moved into brand work when I realised the products I liked best were the ones whose packaging, interface and support pages all sounded like the same company. Twelve years later that is still the job: making the parts agree with each other. I work directly with founders, usually as the only designer, and I hand over systems rather than files — colour, type and spacing rules written so the next person does not have to guess what I meant.
- Based in
- London, United Kingdom
- Experience
- 12+ years
- Status
- Taking projects from March
Selected work
Things I've shipped
Brand & Packaging2025
Kestrel Bicycles
Brand & Packaging
Kestrel had a good frame and a catalogue that looked like a spreadsheet. We rebuilt the identity around the geometry of the frames themselves, then carried it into packaging that survives a courier and a shop floor. The wordmark is drawn to stay legible at head-tube size, which turned out to be the constraint that decided everything else about the system.
Brand & Packaging
Identity2024
Halden Ceramics
Identity
A studio pottery moving from market stalls into wholesale, which meant their labelling suddenly had to answer to buyers as well as customers. We kept the hand-drawn mark they were known for and built a typographic system around it disciplined enough for line sheets, invoices and a trade catalogue without losing what made people pick the pieces up.
Identity
Product Design2024
Ferrow Audio
Product Design
A companion app for a portable amplifier, designed for people using it outdoors with gloves on. Most of the work was subtraction — the first build had every setting on the main screen. We moved to three states that cover ninety percent of real use, and buried the rest where it stops being a distraction during the ten seconds someone actually looks at the screen.
Product Design
Packaging2023
Norrland Provisions
Packaging
Preserved foods sold in a crowded chiller cabinet, where the only thing you can rely on is a shopper's peripheral vision. We built a labelling system around one high-contrast band that reads at two metres and a typographic hierarchy that rewards picking the jar up. Nineteen products now share one grid, which cut their artwork costs more than the redesign did.
Packaging
What I do
Services & expertise
End-to-end product work — from architecture and APIs to pixel-level interface polish.
How I work
A simple, transparent process
Experience
The journey so far
2026 — Present
Full-Stack Developer
Ledgerline
Building a precision talent-hiring platform and a B2B network with Next.js, Node and AI.
2025 — Present
Full-Stack Developer
Summitly
An AI-powered real estate portal — web app plus a React Native mobile app.
2023 — 2025
Full-Stack / Agency Developer
Agency work
Delivered client web apps, dashboards, CRMs and marketing sites across several industries.
2021 — 2022
Frontend Developer
Freelance
E-commerce and business sites — storefronts, booking and reservation systems.
Testimonials
What clients say
- Maya spent the first week in the workshop rather than at a desk, and it showed in everything that followed. She understood that the mark had to work stamped into wet clay before it worked anywhere else, which is not a constraint I had thought to explain. We came away with a system I have applied myself a dozen times since without needing to ask her what was allowed. — Iva Kristiansen, Founder, Halden Ceramics
- We had eighteen months of feature requests and an app that showed all of them at once. Maya's first deliverable was a list of things to remove, with the reasoning attached, and it was uncomfortable reading in the best way. Support tickets about the settings screen dropped to almost nothing after launch, which is the only metric I actually cared about. — Daniel Okonkwo, Head of Product, Ferrow Audio
- What I valued most was being told no. We asked for a heritage look and Maya explained, with examples, why that would put us in the same bracket as companies charging half our price. She was right, and the version we shipped has aged far better than the one I originally asked for would have done. — Rowan Ellis, Managing Director, Atlas Field Tools
FAQ
Questions,answered.
Fixed price for a defined scope, quoted after a paid discovery conversation rather than before it. I have found hourly billing punishes the client for my thinking time and rewards me for being slow, which is the wrong incentive for both of us. Discovery is usually half a day, and if we decide not to work together you keep the notes and the positioning work regardless of what happens next.
Often, but not always at the very beginning. If you are still changing what the product is every fortnight, a finished identity is the wrong thing to buy and I will usually say so. What tends to work better at that stage is a short engagement on positioning and a deliberately provisional visual direction, then the full system once the thing you are selling has stopped moving underneath you.
Source files, exported assets in the formats your suppliers ask for, and written rules covering colour, type, spacing and the decisions I made that are not self-evident from looking at the artwork. The written part matters most. Files tell the next person what I did, and the rules tell them why, which is the only thing that stops a system drifting once I am no longer in the room.