Jon SabutisDesign engineer

Work2026

N Brand Portal

An internal brand portal holding the logos, color tokens, and templates a small team actually needs, so the approved asset stops living in an eight month old Slack thread.

Role
Design and build, end to end
Year
2026
  • Next.js
  • React
  • Tailwind CSS
The N Brand Portal asset library, showing a searchable grid of logo files and brand color swatches.

N Brand Portal is the asset library I built for my own project work, once the same question came up often enough to notice: which logo file is the current one. Every team answers it the same wrong way at first, by asking in chat and waiting for whoever exported it last.

The problem underneath the brief

Brand assets scatter by default. A logo gets exported once, lives on someone's desktop, and gets re-exported slightly differently the next time it is needed because the original is nowhere findable. Color values get retyped by hand into a new file and drift a shade at a time. The fix is not a better naming convention, it is removing the situation a naming convention was trying to patch: there has to be exactly one place that is unambiguously current.

1

Place assets live

Replaces a shared drive, a Slack thread, and whoever exported the file last.

3

Formats per asset

SVG, PNG, and a print ready PDF, generated from the same source file rather than re-exported by hand.

0

Version numbers in filenames

The portal always serves current, so nothing is named final-v3-actually-final.svg.

How it is built

Next.js on the front end, assets stored in blob storage and indexed by metadata rather than folder structure, so a search for a color name or a logo variant returns the same result regardless of who uploaded it or when. Every asset is generated in its three formats at upload time instead of on request, which keeps the portal fast and keeps a designer from ever exporting a PDF by hand again.

The asset library grid, showing logo variants beside a row of brand color swatches with their hex values.
Search and filter sit above the grid, because a small library still gets slow to scan by eye once it holds every past variant.

There is no approval workflow. A small team does not need one, and adding one would slow down the exact task, grabbing the current logo, that the portal exists to speed up.

What I would keep

Generating every format once at upload rather than leaving it to whoever needs the asset next. The portal being fast to search matters less than it never producing a slightly wrong export again.