She started with nothing. Not a logo, not a name, nothing.

First, what the business actually is

Before a single pixel. You cannot design a brand for a business that hasn’t decided what it is.

Albuquerque has plenty of people who do good nails. Being good is not, on its own, a reason to pick somebody. So we worked out what she had that nobody else did, and it turned out to be her personality and the way an appointment with her actually feels.

That became the position, in one line: the salon with fun content and great nails. Not the cheapest and not the fanciest. The one you want to sit with.

From there I wrote her a six month plan: the order things happen in, what counts as done at each stage, and what to ignore until later. Including a rule that she doesn’t spend a dollar on ads until the free channels are proven.

Then the logo and the look

Built to match the voice, not picked because it looked nice that week.

Logo and wordmark drawn in Illustrator. A palette chosen to carry the personality rather than the industry default: coral for energy, a purple mauve for the nail work itself, and a bright yellow used sparingly as the highlight. Type that’s rounded and friendly, because a formal serif would have contradicted every word in the voice guide.

Then the part most people skip. I pulled the colours back out of the finished artwork programmatically and used those exact values in the website code, so the logo file and the live site are provably the same colours. Not close. The same.

One detail from the logo, a triple offset shadow, became a single reusable rule that now runs across her headings, cards, buttons and price swatches. That’s the difference between a site that feels designed and one that feels assembled.

Then getting her found

A beautiful website nobody can find is a very expensive business card.

Normal Google results. Every page written and built around what people in Albuquerque actually type. Her services page goes after nail prices in Albuquerque. Her visit page goes after the questions people ask right before they book.

The questions page. A real questions and answers section, written out plainly, because that’s the format Google and ChatGPT lift from when they write an answer instead of showing links. Hardly anybody builds this for a small business yet.

Her Google listing. A written plan for claiming it, filling it in properly, working up to twenty reviews, and posting twice a week. Her name, address and phone number now match across her website, her booking platform and Google. They didn’t before.

And the thing nobody would have caught. Her details didn’t agree with themselves. The name and phone number on her booking platform were not the ones she was giving out everywhere else. Google reads those as three different businesses and trusts all of them less, which is invisible to you and quietly holds you down the page. Now all three match, on purpose.