Priority Tax Relief

Solo designer for a 200-person, $7M MRR national tax relief company. I owned the brand, every marketing surface, and the internal product simultaneously, for about a year, and built a design system that tied all three together.

• Role: Brand & Product Designer
• Company: Priority Tax Relief, national tax attorney services firm
• Timeline: 2025–2026
• Platform: Responsive web, digital advertising, email, print, broadcast TV, social media, internal CRM
• Team: Solo designer embedded with engineering, marketing, and senior leadership
• Tools: Figma, Adobe Suite, Claude, VS Code, Jupyter Notebooks, Django/Wagtail, WordPress, npm, Microsoft Office
• Outcome: Shipped rebrand, design system released, replatformed website, Chrome extension, internal CRM prototype.

Two briefs wearing the same coat #

The brand was fragmented and inconsistent across every channel I could find: TV spots, PPC ads, website, emails, letterhead, merch. It had good ideas and decent bones, but no steward, no guidelines, no system. That inconsistency was bleeding credibility in a category where trust is the entire product. There was a real opportunity to raise the professional bar above competitors and build something the internal teams could rally around.

Internally, the employees were drowning in a stack of tools they'd outgrown. Getting one case from intake to resolution required switching between half a dozen contexts and manually moving data that should have just been there. The ideas behind the workflows were sound. The execution had hit a ceiling.

Fix the face. Fix the engine. Both at once. Solo.

My Role #

Priority brought me in as their first dedicated designer with a specific mandate: build the design infrastructure the company had been operating without. I worked directly with the ownership group, embedded with engineering, marketing, IT, and senior leadership simultaneously.

My contribution was the throughline across all three tracks in brand, product, and marketing, owned from brief to delivery. I set the visual direction, ran the research, made the system decisions, and produced the final artifacts. Every surface the company touched externally or internally went through me.

Starting with Research, Not Opinions #

Before touching anything I needed to understand the landscape. I ran a full multi-platform brand audit on what existed and what competitors were doing. Then I did something I don't think gets done enough at this category level: I analyzed the actual customer data. Pulled the full paying customer database into a Jupyter notebook and mapped it properly. Demographics, debt range, geography, credit profiles. Real numbers, not guesses.

That analysis fed everything that came after, who we were talking to, what they needed to hear, what would build trust versus what would feel like a sales pitch. I used it to anchor every brand platform decision.

The Brand System #

The logo wasn't a from-scratch redesign, it was a refinement and systematization of an existing concept. The hawk mark had presence. What it needed were tighter geometry, consistent construction rules, and a full system of lockups that would work from a broadcast lower-third to a Chrome extension favicon.

I explored a wide range before narrowing down, including a serif collegiate direction that got pretty far along before being retired, an eagle variant, several weight and spacing variations. The key decision was moving from the existing busy treatment to a cleaner, more confident mark.

The Marlboro Cup racing program from 1987 isn't obvious reference material for a tax firm. But it captured exactly the feeling we were after: authority without stuffiness, the kind of visual confidence that makes a nervous customer feel like they're in capable hands. The moodboard grounded the brand direction in that specific register, confident, direct, American, and gave the team a shared reference point for every creative decision that followed.

From there I built out the full brand platform: color system, typography, voice and copywriting direction, imagery guidelines, supporting brand elements, and complete usage guidelines.

The orange-and-green palette that existed before had the right instincts around warmth and trust, but needed tighter contrast ratios, AA accessibility compliance, and clear production specs for every output: CMYK for print, RGB/HEX for screen, Pantone for broadcast.

Everything got collected into a brand guidelines document and a formal brand book, handed to stakeholders as the source of truth.

Operations: the Surface Designers Usually Skip #

The brand guidelines covered external-facing work, but I also extended the system into the operational layer: the documents employees use every day that shape how the company presents itself in every client interaction.

The most impactful was letterhead. PTR had 80+ Word documents that all had their own ad-hoc header: screenshots of the logo at different resolutions, inconsistent address formatting, no grid. I redesigned the system as proper Word templates: embedded fonts, dynamic fields for case number and date, structured layout, consistent footer with address and pagination. Then rebuilt all 80+ documents using the new template.

I also designed updated email signatures, meeting agenda templates, and a project description format based on the Amazon one-pager. Small things that collectively changed how the company communicated internally and with clients.

Listening Before Building #

The brand system, the operational templates, and the internal product ran off the same engine: the PTR Design Kit, a component library I built and published that made all three coherent simultaneously: brand-aligned, accessible, documented, and usable by engineering without a designer in the room.

While brand work was running, I started the product side with research. I conducted stakeholder interviews across every department (sales, operations, legal, finance, compliance) and built out a full departmental process map alongside a customer journey. This wasn't just documentation; I was looking for where data got stuck, where people were doing work the system should have been doing automatically.

I ran the qualitative interview data through AI-assisted analysis grouping concerns by topic, surfacing themes faster than manual coding. Two passes: by stakeholder, then by issue type.

The First Product Move: a Chrome Extension #

Rather than blowing up the existing Logics CRM and replacing it, we started with a targeted intervention. I designed a Chrome extension that injected new functionality directly into the Logics CRM interface no migration, no retraining, just new capability sitting on top of what people already knew how to use.

The idea was to start putting the data to work for people rather than making people shepherd it from one system to another. That framing, data working for you, became the product philosophy going forward.

This was an appropriately humble first step. It proved the concept, got buy-in from users who saw immediate value, and gave us a real behavioral baseline before designing the next phase.

Building Toward a Platform #

With research validated and an early win in hand, I moved to the full internal platform. Feature discovery sessions with stakeholders, design language exploration, and eventually a high-fidelity prototype modeling the complete case management workflow from intake through resolution.

The first round of design language came out of a paper-based prototype phase sketching the interaction model before committing to visual design. The "Snap Financial Review" form below shows how the product started: a guided interview flow on the left, a structured question panel on the right, built around how agents actually conducted client calls.

The affiliate marketing dashboard was a parallel internal tool and quick win as a reporting surface for the marketing team to see spend, conversion rate, ROI, and partner performance in one place, instead of exporting from four different systems and assembling it manually in a spreadsheet.

The Tax Prep management platform had the same origin story as most internal tools: it started as a spreadsheet. The lead agent had built a working process in Google Sheets, and the team had maxed out its row count. After interviewing them, I had enough to prototype directly against their workflow.

I used the design system and a DaisyUI-based theme to build a clickable HTML prototype, something you could actually navigate and click through as if it were the final product. That touchable prototype changed the conversation. Instead of debating abstract requirements, engineering and stakeholders could interact with the intended experience, test the logic, and identify gaps before a single line of backend code was written.

Marketing Across Every Surface #

Brand and product were running in parallel, and marketing was running alongside both of them constantly. PPC was the primary acquisition channel as a high-volume, cost-sensitive environment where ad creative had to be consistent with the new brand while also performing against direct response metrics.

I designed campaign assets across formats including Google Performance Max and Meta Demand Gen adapting transitionary brand language to landscape, portrait, and square across multiple placements. The real-people, documentary-style direction outperformed the previous polished creative on scroll-stop rate and cost-per-click, and it held up across both Google Performance Max and Meta Demand Gen environments.

I built a full email component system covering the complete funnel with modular components so the marketing team could assemble campaigns without coming back to me for every single email. Lead prospect sequences, confirmation flows, review-in-progress updates, last-chance re-engagement, and transactional client-facing onboarding. Fully responsive.

The Tax Forgiveness Calculator #

One of the primary marketing surfaces was a tax forgiveness estimator, a qualification tool that pre-qualifies prospects before they ever see the brand. The original was a linear step-through form. I redesigned it as a modular multi-step modal, reducing the apparent burden of the form and increasing completion rates.

Replatforming the Marketing Site #

The existing WordPress site had a performance score of 68 and 64 accessibility issues. I built the case for migrating to Django/Wagtail with a formal technical audit, then designed and built the new site in-browser using Claude for rapid iteration.

The handoff package is a static build that engineering can lift into production without reverse-engineering the source as annotated pages, a decision log, component inventory, and every open design decision they need to make before they start building.

Outcomes #

• Increased customer conversion opportunities by 14× through funnel redesign
• Improved website performance from 68 to 91–100 (Lighthouse score) through platform migration
• Accessibility: from 64 issues to achieving AA WCAG compliance
• Decreased time to launch marketing materials from weeks to days
• Developed clickable HTML prototypes in hours rather than days
• Published design system, standardizing engineering and design expectations across teams
• Rebuilt 80+ operational documents on the new brand template system

Reflection #

There was a lot of ground to cover and I moved through it fast. But I don't think I brought the ownership group along with me consistently enough.

The gap wasn't the work. It was the governance model for how decisions got surfaced. I was operating at a design-strategy pace, making dozens of decisions a day to maintain momentum. The ownership group wanted to be present for ground-level decisions. Neither was wrong. But without an explicit agreement upfront about what I'd own autonomously and what needed their input, that difference in operating tempo became friction.

What I'd do differently: establish a decision-rights framework at the start of any embedded solo engagement. What I decide, what I present, how often, and what requires sign-off before moving. That structure protects both sides.

The system thinking was right. The stakeholder communication needed more structure.