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Octus.

A project management platform that finally feels calm — identity, design system and product, end to end.

Year

2026

Sector

SaaS · Project Management

Audience

Cross-functional product teams

Scope

Brand · Identity · Design System · Product

Timeline

14 weeks · Oct '25 — Feb '26

Fig. 01 · Hero composition · brand + product surface Daydream · Original commission

Most project tools are accidentally cluttered. Sidebars stack three layers deep, every action lives behind a kebab menu, and the home view is a wall of unread badges. Teams open them, sigh, and go back to a Google Doc.

Octus came to us with a working alpha, a Series A in the bag, and one mandate: “make it the calmest place in the company.” A platform where a designer, a PM, and an engineer could each open the same screen on a Monday morning and feel like the day was about to be productive — not noisy.

Our job was to design Octus from the wordmark out: a brand that reads as professional but never corporate, a product surface that fits a quarter of work into a single fold without ever shouting, and a design system the in-house team could ship against on day one.

“We want it to feel like good furniture — obvious where everything goes, and you barely notice it's there.”

— from the kickoff brief

Two non-negotiables shaped everything that followed: it had to read as professional infrastructure — trusted by a 200-person org — and it had to feel distinctly Octus: a single, confident violet on a quiet bone-white page.

We split the engagement into three parallel tracks. Strategy ran for two weeks ahead of everything; identity and product design started together in week three and shipped the same week.

Pillar / 01

One violet, one quiet page

A single confident accent doing all the heavy lifting. Bone-white surfaces, slate type, no stripes of color, no three-tone gradients buried in components.

Pillar / 02

Seven things, seven feelings

No screen ever shows more than seven pieces of information at once. The hierarchy is the design — not the chrome around it.

Pillar / 03

Ship the system, not the screens

A 42-component design system in Figma, mirrored 1:1 in code. Marketing site and product app draw from one library; one violet token, one ink token, one motion curve.

03Identity / Brand

A wordmark with a knot.

Octus reads as one breath — two crisp syllables. We built a custom monogram that loops back on itself like a project plan that finally closes; the dot in the eye of the knot is the team, watching the whole thing hold together. The mark sits in violet, the wordmark in calm slate.

Mark · Lockup primary

Symbol stacked over the wordmark.

octus
Wordmark · Detail study

Slate gray, near-monoline geometry. The closing 's' carries the same curve as the lower lobe of the mark.

octus
Custom · Drawn from a modified Geist Mono —0.04em tracking
Wordmark Symbol Stacked lockup Avatar
Color · System

Five tokens. One confident violet doing all the work, a softer lift for hover and gradient lockups, slate for type, a quiet bone for paper, and a near-white tint for surfaces.

Tokens · v1.0
Pulse
#5B2EFF Action · 60
Lift
#9B5BFF Hover · 50
Slate
#2C2A3E Ink · 100
Mist
#ECEBF4 Surface · 10
Paper
#F7F6FB Page · 00
Display · Geist

For headlines and the wordmark itself. Geometric, even-weighted, quietly confident.

Plan less. Ship more.
Weights

Regular · Medium · Semibold

Tracking

—0.03em display
—0.01em body

Body · Geist (text)

A single workhorse family across product and marketing. Tabular numerals on for any timeline, deadline, or progress count.

Octus is one calm, professional surface where teams plan, track, and ship together — without the kebab menus, the badge spam, or the second tool you opened to escape the first.

Numerals

Tabular, slashed-zero on

Mono

JetBrains Mono
captions · metadata

04Marketing Site / Web

Trust on the first scroll.

A single-page site whose first 800px does all the work — a calm hero, the two outcomes that matter, and the only two things a visitor can do: start a free workspace, or book a demo. Built in Next.js with a Sanity-backed content layer the team can edit themselves.

○  octus.com
2/3
Product Teams Pricing Changelog
Start free
v1.4 · Now with calm mode

The calmest place your team works.

Plan, track, and ship together on one quiet page. No badge spam, no kebab menus, no second tool you opened to escape the first.

Start a free workspace → ▶ Watch the 90s tour
+38% ship velocity
−72% status meetings
12K+
Teams on Octus
98%
Weekly retention
3.2×
Faster than the last tool
42
Components in the system
Fig. 02 · octus.com · Landing, above-the-fold Built · Next.js + Sanity
05Product / App

A team dashboard, end to end.

The first surface a team sees on Monday morning. We designed a panel that fits a sprint's worth of activity into a single fold — without ever showing more than seven pieces of information at once. Built on a 42-component design system shared with the marketing site.

app.octus.com — Today
Monday · 9 May · 09:14

Good morning, Maya.

⌕ Search projects, tasks, people…
Open tasks
12
▲ −2 since Friday
Due this week
04
2 due today
Sprint progress
68%
▲ on track
Cycle time
3.4d
median · last 30d

Active projects

All projects →
Project Lead Due Status
Q2 Public launch Sara K. Jun 2 In review
Onboarding v3 Diego R. Jun 5 Drafting
Brand refresh · v1.4 Maya P. May 30 Shipped
Calm mode (beta) Lin C. Jun 11 In review
Mobile push redesign Owen T. Jun 14 Drafting

Activity

Today
Sara moved a task to Review
Q2 Launch · Pricing page
09:02
Diego commented on your draft
Onboarding v3 · step 2
08:41
You shipped 3 tasks from Brand refresh
Logo, palette, type scale
Fri
Lin requested your review
Calm mode · spec v0.4
Thu
Owen joined the team
Role: Product Design
Wed
Fig. 03 · app.octus.com · Today view System · 42 components · 4 themes
06Outcomes / Results

Six months after launch.

Public launch shipped end of February. By August, Octus had a paid waitlist and the team had moved their entire internal planning onto the product. Numbers from the company's August board update.

12K+

Teams running on Octus

98%

Weekly retention, paid plans

3.2×

Faster than the previous tool, self-reported

−72%

Fewer status meetings per team / week

$28M

Series B closed, Aug '26

4.9/5

App store rating, both platforms

14

Weeks brand to public launch

42

Components in the shipped system
07Words / Voice of the client

Daydream took us from a working alpha to a brand teams actually recommend to each other — in less time than it would've taken us to hire a head of design.”

Maya Patel

Founder & CEO · Octus
08Credits / Team

A team of five, plus the client.

We staffed the project with one strategist, two designers, two engineers — the full Daydream small-room formula — and ran a single Slack channel with the Octus founders for fourteen weeks straight.

Strategy & Narrative

Frida GutiérrezDaydream

Identity & Art Direction

Mateo ReyesDaydream

Product Design

Ana Pérez SolísDaydream

Engineering

Diego SalinasDaydream
Pablo MéndezDaydream

Photography

Studio PelícanoMexico City, MX

Stack & Tooling

Next.js · PostgresSanity · Vercel · Linear

Client

Maya Patel, fdrLin Cho, Head of Product

Launch

February 24, 2026Public · v1.0

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