DEV Community: Cliff Martin

We Built a Figma Plugin. Here's What It Actually Does.

Cliff Martin — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:34:36 +0000

Most brand tools ask you to leave the place you actually work. Open Figma, design something, then switch tabs to a separate dashboard and manually re-type every color you just picked.

Today we shipped the first piece of something different: a real, working Figma plugin for BrandStack.

Open a Figma file, and the plugin reads every Paint Style and Color Variable already in that file. Select the ones you want, give them a role if you haven't already, and click one button. They land directly in your BrandStack Colors section, no tab-switching, no manual re-entry, no copying hex codes by hand.

The moment they land, the rest of the system picks them up automatically. Primary Shades generates a full 9-step tonal scale from each one. Greyscale derives a tinted neutral palette from your actual brand hue. Spectrum's Auto-Suggest can build accessible color pairings straight from what you just pushed. One action in Figma, an entire color system updates in BrandStack.

This is the direction the whole product is heading: not asking designers to abandon the tools they already live in, making those tools better. Colors is the first slice. Typography and Logos are next.

Built solo, including the plugin itself: a separate Figma-sandboxed codebase, a token-based auth system since plugins can't share a web session, and a live API endpoint validating every push. Hit real bugs along the way (Figma blocks localStorage inside its plugin UI, of all things) and fixed them one at a time until a real color, selected in a real Figma file, showed up live in the actual product.

Why One Flat Brand Color Isn't a System

Cliff Martin — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:53:52 +0000

Ask anyone on a small team what the "correct" light blue is, and they'll probably second-guess themselves.

Not because anyone's careless. It's because most small teams have one flat brand color and stop there. No systematic tints or shades, so every hover state, every disabled button, every chart accent gets manually eyeballed on the spot.

Multiply that across even a handful of projects, and you end up with scattered near-duplicates nobody documented, nobody agreed on, and everybody quietly works around.

This isn't a discipline problem. Building a full tonal color system by hand, for every project, just isn't worth the hours when you're a solo designer or a small studio trying to ship actual client work.

Spent today building the fix for this inside BrandStack: auto-generated tonal shades (one brand color in, a full 9-step scale out), a tinted greyscale derived from your actual brand hue instead of generic flat grey, and an extended color spectrum for charts and data visualization with lock, duplicate, and regenerate built in.

None of this is glamorous. It's exactly the kind of thing that quietly costs a small team hours every week when it's missing, and nobody notices until someone asks which blue is actually correct.

Brand Management on a $0 Budget

Cliff Martin — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:39:00 +0000

Every brand management platform I've researched while building BrandStack shares one thing in common: none of them have a real free tier. Frontify, Bynder all of them require a sales conversation before you even see a price. That's normal for enterprise software, but it also means an entire category of people students, early freelancers, side-project founders, small studios just starting out are told this problem doesn't have a solution unless they can afford one.

That's not true. Here's what's actually possible at $0.

What you actually need, and what it costs

A brand system needs four things: defined colors with clear roles, a documented type scale, logo usage rules, and a few sentences on voice. None of that inherently requires paid software it requires structure, which is free to create if you have the right format.

Where free tools genuinely fall short

A shared Google Doc or Notion page can hold all of this information. What it can't do is keep it usable there's no way to export a color as a CSS variable, no automatic RGB/CMYK conversion, no structured place for logo usage rules that stays separate from a wall of unformatted text.

Why we built a genuinely usable free tier

This is exactly why BrandStack's Solo tier is free, not a time-limited trial. One brand, colors and typography with real structure, a basic exportable guide. If you're a student, a first-year freelancer, or testing whether a structured brand system is even useful to you yet, there's no reason that should cost anything.

When it makes sense to pay

The free tier stops making sense the moment you're managing more than one brand, need team access, or want the full guideline export and brand score tracking. At that point, $19/month is genuinely cheaper than the time cost of manually managing multiple clients' brand assets in scattered docs.

The honest bottom line

You don't need a budget to run a consistent brand. You need a system.

brand-stack.app

Brand Guidelines for Freelancers: What You Actually Need

Cliff Martin — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:55:00 +0000

Most articles about "brand guidelines" assume you're documenting a brand for a team that doesn't exist yet if you're a freelancer. They talk about stakeholder alignment, approval workflows, and multi-department consistency. None of that applies when it's just you, a client, and maybe one collaborator on a project.

Here's what actually matters when you're freelancing or running a small studio.

You need fewer sections, not more

Enterprise brand guidelines often run 40-80 pages: mission statements, brand pillars, tone-of-voice matrices for six different departments. As a freelancer, you need four things clearly documented: colors (with roles, not just hex codes), typography (with a clear hierarchy), logo usage rules, and a couple of sentences on tone. That's it.

Usage notes matter more than the assets themselves

A logo file without a rule for minimum size or clear space isn't a guideline, it's just a file. The single highest-value thing you can document for a client is the one sentence next to it that says "don't use this on busy backgrounds." That sentence is what prevents misuse six months after you've moved on.

Guidelines need to survive without you in the room

The real test of a brand guideline is whether someone can open it eight months later, with no memory of the handoff meeting, and still use the brand correctly.

A PDF is a snapshot, not a system

The moment you export a brand guide as a PDF, it starts going stale. For a freelancer juggling multiple clients, keeping track of which PDF is current becomes its own unpaid job.

What this means practically

The goal isn't a more comprehensive guideline. It's a system easy enough to keep current one place where color roles, type hierarchy, logo rules, and voice notes live, updated once and handed off as a link instead of a file that immediately starts drifting from reality.

brand-stack.app

BrandStack vs. Frontify: Brand Management for Freelancers and Small Studios

Cliff Martin — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:26:00 +0000

Frontify is a genuinely strong product if you're running brand governance for a company like Uber, across multiple regions, with dozens of stakeholders who all need different levels of access to a shared brand system. That's exactly who it's built for, and it shows in every part of their platform: sub-portals by region, approval workflows, SSO, multi-language interactive guidelines.

Most of the people searching for brand management software aren't that. They're a freelance designer juggling three client brands, or a five-person studio trying to keep one shared type scale straight across projects. For that person, a platform built around regional sub-portals and multi-department governance isn't a feature set it's overhead.

Where Frontify wins

If you're managing a brand across multiple countries, need SSO for a large organization, or have to coordinate dozens of external agency partners with tightly scoped permissions, Frontify's depth is genuinely useful. That complexity is the product, not a bug for the right customer.

Where that same complexity works against you

A solo designer doesn't need a "brand deployer" module or region-specific sub-portals. They need to store a color with its usage notes, export it to CSS, and move on with the actual client work. Enterprise brand platforms are usually priced and structured around per-seat licensing and annual contracts reasonable for a company with a dedicated brand team, a real cost and commitment mismatch for someone billing hourly.

What BrandStack does instead

BrandStack skips the enterprise governance layer entirely and focuses on the part that actually matters for a solo designer or small studio: colors, typography, logos, voice, and guidelines, stored with context and exported instantly to CSS, Tailwind, or JSON. No SSO to configure, no regional sub-portals to set up just a brand system you can actually start using in the time it takes to sign up.

Pricing is the clearest signal of who each tool is actually for

Frontify's pricing isn't public it requires a sales conversation, which is typical for enterprise software but tells you plainly who the intended buyer is. BrandStack has a genuinely usable free Solo tier, with paid plans starting at $19/month for a small studio.

The honest recommendation

If you're running brand operations across a large organization with multiple stakeholders and regional teams, Frontify's complexity earns its place. If you're a freelancer or a small studio who just needs your brand assets organized somewhere you'll actually use them, that same complexity is exactly what you don't need.

brand-stack.app

Building a SaaS solo, as a Graphic designer

Cliff Martin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:35:00 +0000

I came into this as a graphic designer, not a software engineer. I didn't have a computer science background, and a lot of what BrandStack needed authentication, databases, payments, deployment was new territory for me when I started.

What made it possible wasn't some shortcut. It was breaking the problem down into pieces I could actually learn: how user accounts work, how a database should be structured so one person's data never leaks into another's, how to move from test payments to real ones without breaking checkout for actual customers.

I made real mistakes along the way. Early on, every user shared the same underlying brand data because I hadn't scoped the database correctly to each account a serious bug that I only caught by testing with two separate accounts myself. Finding and fixing that taught me more about proper application architecture than any tutorial could have.

I don't think being a designer first is a disadvantage for building product. If anything, it means the interface and the experience get real attention, not just the backend logic. But it does mean being honest about what you don't know yet, and being willing to slow down and actually understand a problem instead of copying a fix you don't understand.

BrandStack is still a work in progress. But it's a real, working product built by someone who had to learn most of this from scratch, in public, one bug at a time.