Frontier Risk is the first tech-enabled insurance brokerage focused on the cannabis industry — backed by $3.1M in seed funding from Casa Verde Capital and led by former cannabis industry executives. I worked alongside Simon Forgacs to build the company’s design foundation from the ground up: brand identity, design system, and marketing website.

My Role

Design system architecture (Figma, design tokens), brand identity overhaul, marketing website design and development (Webflow), responsive layouts, CMS integration, illustration direction.

The Problem

Cannabis insurance is complicated. It’s a heavily regulated, fast-evolving industry where most businesses struggle to understand what coverage they need, let alone how to get it. Frontier Risk’s pitch was to make that simple — but their digital presence didn’t reflect that yet. The existing brand felt generic, there was no design system, and the company needed a website that could do two things at once: build trust with a skeptical audience and convert visitors into leads.

On top of that, whatever we built needed to scale. The company was planning a customer portal for policy management and claims, so the design language and component system had to extend beyond a marketing site.

What I Built

Brand Identity

The existing brand needed more than a refresh — it needed a rethink. I overhauled the visual identity to position Frontier Risk as a tech-forward, modern company rather than a traditional insurance brokerage. That meant reworking the color system, typography, and visual language to strike a balance: professional enough to earn trust in a regulated industry, approachable enough that a cannabis business owner doesn’t feel like they’re reading a legal document.

I established brand guidelines that ensured consistency across every touchpoint — website, marketing collateral, presentations, and the future customer portal.

Design System

I designed and architected a token-based design system in Figma. Tokens for color, spacing, typography, and elevation — structured so the system could support both the marketing site and the planned application layer without diverging into two separate visual languages.

The component library covered everything from marketing modules (hero sections, feature blocks, testimonial cards) to more functional patterns (insurance quote forms, multi-step application workflows, policy comparison layouts). The goal was to build once and reuse everywhere, so when the engineering team eventually built the portal, they’d have a clear, documented system to work from rather than a collection of one-off screens.

Marketing Website

I designed and developed the website in Webflow — responsive layouts, CMS collections for dynamic content, and performance optimization. The site needed to do real work: explain complex insurance products clearly, guide different types of cannabis businesses (cultivators, dispensaries, manufacturers) to the right coverage, and drive quote requests.

The information architecture was the hardest part. Insurance products have a lot of conditional logic — what you need depends on your business type, your state, your revenue. I designed the content structure and navigation so that a dispensary owner in Colorado and a cultivator in California could both find relevant information quickly without wading through content meant for the other.

Illustration & Visual Direction

I directed the illustration style for the website — custom visuals that reinforced the brand’s approachable, modern tone. These weren’t decorative; they served a functional purpose, helping explain insurance concepts and breaking up dense informational content so the pages stayed scannable.

Impact

• Launched a cohesive digital platform that established Frontier Risk’s market presence as a modern, tech-enabled brokerage
• Built a scalable design system and component library that extended beyond the marketing site to support future product development
• Created a brand identity that differentiated Frontier Risk in a market full of generic insurance branding
• Delivered a fully responsive, CMS-driven marketing website in Webflow with performance best practices

What I Learned

This project was a good reminder that design systems aren’t just for large-scale products. Even for an early-stage startup with a marketing site, investing in tokens and a structured component library pays off immediately — it made the Webflow build faster, kept the visual language tight, and gave the team a real foundation to build on instead of a pile of static mockups. Working with Simon also reinforced how much better the work gets when you’re collaborating closely with someone who challenges your thinking.