01 · BRAND IDENTITY · WEBSITE · PRODUCT DESIGN · 2026
Glim
Catch the good lines
SCOPE
Brand identity, naming, voice, product design (web + mobile), marketing site, brand guidelines.
ROLE
Lead designer. End to end, naming to launch.
TYPE
Brand reimagining of the social reading category.
A brand and product reimagining of the social reading category, built around moments instead of metrics. Where Goodreads tracks completion (books finished, stars given, challenges met), Glim captures attention: the lines that stayed with you, the passages a friend just underlined, the book someone you trust just picked up.
The brand built around the smallest unit of reading attention: a single glim.
02 · THE OPPORTUNITY
What Goodreads forgot.
Reading is mostly small moments. A line that makes you stop. A paragraph you re-read. A passage you'd never get tattooed but kind of want to.
For twenty years, the category has measured reading the way Amazon measures everything else: by what's finished, what's rated, what's been added to a cart. Goodreads turned reading into a leaderboard, then Amazon bought it, and the leaderboard never left. The brief was to design what comes after.
Goodreads measures completion. Glim measures attention.
03 · NAMING
From defunct brands to
forgotten words.
The name came from two false starts.
First I went looking for a brand that no longer existed. Borders. Waldenbooks. Brentano's. I thought I could resurrect one. None of them quite worked. Reviving a known dead brand always carries the ghost of the original.
Then I went hunting through archaic English, looking for a word that was almost forgotten but still pronounceable. Something that felt invented but had a real etymology to anchor it.
Glim is an obsolete English word for a fleeting light, a glimpse, a faint glimmer. Almost no one knows it. Single syllable, soft consonants, full of meaning. The kind of word that feels like it could have been a startup if startups had been books.
The brand built around the smallest unit of reading attention: a single glim.
04 · POSITIONING
The corner no one
was sitting in.
Plotted against its category (Goodreads, StoryGraph, Letterboxd, Substack, Are.na), every existing reading product competes on either completion (how many) or volume (how loud). Glim sits alone in the quiet, moment-driven corner. The strategic gap became the entire product brief.
05 · IDENTITY
One idea,
ruthlessly applied.
The wordmark is set in Newsreader, lowercase. The dot of the i is replaced by a small warm point of amber. That dot is the glim.
That single detail is the entire brand system in miniature. It's the favicon. The app icon. The loading state. The underline beneath a passage. The unread indicator on notifications. The cursor when you write.
One idea, applied everywhere, in proportion to where it appears. That's the discipline that makes a brand feel like a brand instead of a moodboard.
06 · VOICE
We notice. We don't shout.
Observant. Lowercase, on purpose. Slightly dry. The opposite of Goodreads' Amazon-warehouse energy. References allowed. Exclamation marks not.
07 · THE CARD
The card is the product.
Every piece of content in Glim is a card. Three flavors cover the full emotional surface of reading. PASSAGE, a line from a book. NOTE, a thought in your own words. READING, a book you've just picked up.
The system is small enough to hold in your head. I never had to invent a fourth.
The card is the smallest brand statement and the largest navigational unit. The feed is a stack of cards. The book page is a stack of cards filtered by book. The profile is a stack of cards filtered by reader. One component, infinite contexts, the entire product.
08 · THE WEBSITE
Selling restraint.
Most product landing pages sell features. The Glim landing page sells a position, a thesis about what reading is and isn't. The hero is a collage of real glims, not a marketing illustration. The manifesto block, “Reading isn't a scoreboard”, is the single loudest moment on the page, set in amber. Everything else stays quiet on purpose.
09 · PRODUCT
Four surfaces,
one system.
The same component grammar carries across every screen. Feed, capture, book detail, profile. Designed for mobile and desktop in parallel, with each surface translating the system natively rather than scaling it down.
The amber dot threads through everything. Sometimes as the wordmark. Sometimes as a passage underline. Sometimes as the cursor. Sometimes as an unread indicator. Same dot, every context.
Feed. A vertical stack of glims from readers you follow. Quiet, no algorithm, no engagement metrics.
Capture. Three states: chooser, editor, confirmation. The product opens with a question, not a text field. The cursor is amber. The confirmation is one word, Caught.
Book detail. No star ratings, on purpose. Most caught replaces Most popular, surfacing the passages readers return to.
Profile. Bios in italic serif. Profession over follower count. Collections, named and curated sets of passages, become the social currency.
10 · BRAND GUIDELINES
A small book for
a quiet brand.
The brand guide is eighteen slides. Foundation, identity, system, application, closing. Designed to feel like a Fitzcarraldo monograph, not a corporate deck. Built to be opened twice: once in full at the start of the engagement, and again as a reference whenever a new surface needs designing.
11 · WHAT THE WORK TAUGHT ME
Designing the metric.
I went into this project thinking the design problem was visual. How to make a reading product that didn't look like Amazon. The deeper problem turned out to be conceptual. How to design a product that measured something different in the first place. Drawing a logo is easy. Deciding what a metric counts is harder, slower, and more honest about the work brand and product designers actually do.
Catch the good lines.
