Honeystack is a Wichita, Kansas based studio focused on helping non-profits navigate their tech stack.
As lead designer, I led the creative direction and design of the Honeystack brand across product, motion, illustration, and print.
Honeystack helps nonprofits use software well. We gave them a warm, plain spoken brand that turns an intimidating tech stack into something any small team can actually run.
Overview
A brand to take the fear out of technology
Nonprofits are told to go digital, then handed a pile of tools that all look and behave differently. Honeystack is a consulting and education studio that helps them make sense of it, from choosing the right software to wiring it all together.
They came to us for an identity that felt human rather than corporate, one that could carry courses, consulting and hands on builds without ever feeling like enterprise software. The whole job was to lower the temperature on technology.
Define
Make technology feel like a hive
Everything started with one image. A hive is a huge number of small parts working together to make something rich and worth protecting, which is exactly what a healthy nonprofit tech stack looks like when it is set up well. Honey gave us a way to talk about technology that felt warm, collaborative and alive.
Software should feel less like a server room and more like a hive.
Create
A warm, stackable system
From that idea we built a full identity. A friendly wordmark, a stackable icon system for the tools nonprofits live in, and a small cast of characters to guide people through the work.
Logo and wordmark
The wordmark is rounded and approachable, with a honey drop built into the mark so the brand reads as warm before anyone has read a single word.
The stack
Every nonprofit leans on the same handful of tools, and every one of those tools ships its own loud, mismatched logo. So we redrew the whole set in one house style. Each app becomes a single comb cell, which means Slack, Notion, Figma and the rest finally look like they belong together. They literally stack into a honeycomb, which is the whole point of a tech stack.
[Placeholder: the tool logos redrawn in Honeystack's style and stacked into a honeycomb. Honeystack mark at the center, with Slack, Notion, Figma, Asana, Mailchimp and WordPress as comb cells around it.]
The cast
Software is easier to trust when something friendly is showing you around. Three characters drawn from the real world of honey each carry a different part of Honeystack.
The Honeyguide
the wayfinder
In the wild, the honeyguide bird leads people straight to a hidden hive. Ours does the same for nonprofits, pointing them toward the right tools and walking them through onboarding, courses and first steps.
The Honey Badger
the builder
Fearless and famously stubborn, the honey badger digs in and does the messy setup work. It stands for the studio, the hands on team that wires the systems together and does not quit until they run.
The Honey Bees
the colony
A hive is thousands of small contributions adding up to something strong. The bees are the nonprofit teams themselves and the connected tools working as one, the everyday effort behind the impact flywheel.
Type and palette
A clean grotesk keeps everything legible and modern, warmed up by a palette of honey golds and soft creams so the brand feels friendly without losing its edge.
In the wild
One brand across every service
The system now runs across everything Honeystack makes, from self paced courses and live cohorts to the studio work that sets up a nonprofit's tools for good. The same warmth carries from a landing page to a slide to a setup checklist.
[stat]
nonprofits onboarded in year one
[stat]
of users set up their stack without extra support
[stat]
courses launched across the platform
[Placeholder testimonial] The brand finally sounds like us. It takes the hardest part of our work, the software, and makes it feel approachable for the small teams we serve.
[Name], [Role] at Honeystack
Identity, icon system and characters for honeystack, 2026.