Youfiliate: Brand and Product Design

Every creator drops affiliate links into descriptions, bios and newsletters, then forgets them. A product gets discontinued, a retailer changes a URL, a page goes down. The link stays up. Traffic keeps flowing to a dead page, the commission stops, and nobody notices for months.

YouTube is where it hurts most. A channel with a hundred videos is carrying hundreds of links that nobody will ever check by hand.

We started with the asterisk. It marks a footnote, which is where affiliate links live, and it doubles as a junction where one line splits into many.

Then we broke one arm off, turned it and pointed away from the mark, it reads as a redirect. Sitting apart from it, it reads as a link that snapped. The four accents got named for jobs they would do later on screen. Signal Violet for action, Verified Lime for healthy, Cloudlink for redirected, Creator Coal for broken. 

The dashboard is built around whether a creator's income is safe, so broken links show up carrying their cost. Someone reads "1,890 clicks a month going nowhere" and gets it immediately. A 404 code tells them nothing.

Fixing links is the entire product, so we gave it the most care. Nothing touches a description without a preview first and a rollback after.

We shipped full identity, a design system in light and dark, 60+ screens across desktop and mobile, and a working prototype.