Sam Naidoo
Creative directorOndo
Cape Town
Identity and packaging for food and drink brands.
Emailsam@ondo.studioPhone+27 21 555 0235Websiteondo.studioAddressCape Town, South Africa
Designed to make your brand stand out
Andrew Geerdts · 29 October 2026 · 4 min read
Umbel is designed so that a card carries your brand and almost nothing of ours. The app around it is grey with one accent, every part of it has a job, and a card is handed over in a second. Four things decide the arguments: modern, functional, fun and easy.
A digital card is an odd thing to design. It is our product, but it is your page. The thing a person looks at after they scan a code is you: your name, your company, your colours. So the rule we keep coming back to is that the card belongs to whoever made it, and everything Umbel puts near it has to be quiet enough to let it do its job. Most of the design decisions below are about taking something out rather than adding it.
Your brand, not ours
Those are five of the twelve cards on our home page. They are made in the same editor and drawn by the same code, and no two of them look alike: different colours, different typefaces, different backgrounds, a photo on some and none on others. That is the test we set ourselves. If every Umbel card looked like an Umbel card, we would have built a directory and called it a card.
What Umbel leaves on a card is one small mark in the footer. A free card also carries a Join Umbel line, and Pro and Team take it off. That is the whole of it. There is no banner, no badge on your photo and no Umbel colour anywhere on your page.
Modern
Modern is the easiest of the four to get wrong, because it usually gets read as whatever looks current. We mean something duller and more useful: a card is a web page, so there is nothing for anyone to install. It finishes drawing in about a third of a second, it works on a phone that is years old, and it goes anywhere a link goes, which means a QR code, an NFC tag, a message, an email signature or a pass in a wallet all land on the same page. The typefaces and the patterns are served by us, so your card never fetches a file from another company to draw itself.
The app you edit it in is grey on purpose. One near black ink marks the single most important action on a screen, there are three sizes of text, and the icons are thin grey lines. Nothing in the furniture competes for attention, so the colour you see on a screen is almost always coming from the content: a card, a company logo, somebody's photo, or a state that needs you, like a draft or a lapsed plan.
Functional
Every part of the product has to do a job that somebody would miss if it went. The clearest case is the editor: there is no home screen in it and no pages under it, because the card is the editor. You change a part of the card where that part sits, you watch it change, and you press Save once when you are done. A team's template works the same way, as a document a manager fills in, with each part either set for everybody or left to the person whose card it is.
The same test applies after the card has been handed over. Analytics shows four numbers and where the views came from, not a wall of charts. Contacts keeps what the form actually collected. Nothing in either is there to make the product look substantial.
Fun
A card is one of the few business things people enjoy fiddling with, so the editor is built to be fiddled with. There are sixteen typefaces, any brand colour you like, a card on a page or a full page edge to edge, and backgrounds with patterns the browser draws rather than pictures it downloads. The presets are live miniatures of your own card, so you are choosing between versions of yourself rather than stock thumbnails. In the phone app your code is one pull away, and you can show it on your Lock Screen. Fun here means the product is pleasant to use, not that it animates at you.
Umbel's own look is two typefaces, which is the opposite of the choice we give you. The headings are set in Bricolage Grotesque and everything else in Inter, and that is the whole type system, on the site, in the app and in email.
Bricolage GrotesqueAa
InterAa
Easy
The person you hand a card to is the real test of easy, because they did not choose Umbel. They point a camera at a code, or tap a tag, and your card opens in the browser they already have. There is no app, no account and no permission dialog in the way, and Save contact drops you into their phone as an ordinary contact. On our side of it, making a card is a handful of screens and ends in a card that is live at an address you can read out loud.
No. A card's design is yours and nothing in it is tied to Umbel's look, so it changes when you change it and not before.