9am.works

9am.works is a Berlin-based freelance platform. I joined before launch and led the brand, the product design and the design system, through launch and the first campaigns.

Problem

A new freelance platform needed a brand and a product that worked for freelancers and for the companies hiring them.

What I did

Led discovery with both sides, then designed the brand, the product and a design system that sits on top of Ant Design.

Result

9am.works launched with its own brand, a complete interface and a solid design system, and I stayed on for the first campaigns.

Context & problem

9am.works is a freelance platform based in Berlin. It serves freelancers looking for projects and the companies and agencies that hire them. When I started it was still pre-launch, so the brand and the product were both waiting to be designed.

Discovery started with benchmarking and branding explorations, to find a fresh approach tailored to how freelancers actually want to set up their profiles and search for offers. Most platforms in this space felt rigid, so the challenge was managing both sides at once: the recruiter and company side, and a freelancer side that could show off skills and projects in a more flexible way.

Scope & my role

I was embedded in the 9am.works team from the start, working directly with the founders and the engineering team, rather than as an outside CodeControl contractor. I helped set the product up, then handed it over to the in-house design team that took it forward.

I owned

Discovery with freelancers and hiring companies
Brand identity and guidelines
Onboarding and profile creation, with automations and auto-import from other platforms
Communication, matching, and the apply-to-hire flow
The design system

Brand

The brand started from scratch. I set the style and the first user experience, and I put the guidelines together in Figma. They cover a colour palette with a primary blue plus success, warning and error colours, a grey scale, and a type system that pairs Rubik for display with Inter for text. They also include several versions of the logo, with an animated mark, and illustration examples such as 3D assets and a digital clock showing 9:00.

Colour palette, typography and logo variants.

Brand guidelines.

Logo variants.

Product

My work covered the core flows: onboarding, profile creation with automations and auto-import, communication, matching, and the flow from applying to reviewing, interviewing and hiring, pulling in content from external platforms without adding extra steps to the application.

Design system

I built an adaptable design system for the React app, with Ant Design as the base, customising it throughout for a consistent brand identity and component library, so design and code could move together. By the end of the project 9am.works had a distinctive brand and an interface with a solid design system behind it.

9am.works has since grown into one of Germany’s largest freelancer marketplaces, with thousands of freelancers on board.