A lock that explains itself.
Steel FYI is Dan Steel's information security consultancy for startups, small businesses and charities. In 2024 I drew its mark, designed and built its site, and wrote and ran its content. It also holds a second door, Builtwith, for the shops and sites I make.
- for
- Steel FYI
- year
- 2024
- built on
- Wix
- pages
- 24
- work
- mark, design, build, words
- address
- steel.fyi
> file opened. this one is about keeping files closed.
Security, said plainly.
Small companies get priced out of good security, and then talked down to by the people selling it. Dan spent ten years building security teams inside bigger companies and wanted to offer the same thing by the day, to the ones who can't hire a team.
So the site had to sound like him: flexible, pragmatic, no red tape. A free half-hour call instead of a sales funnel. Prices on the page. And nothing that looks like a padlock on a blue shield.
> it guards things. it would rather tell you how.
A name in orbit.
steel / fyitwo inks, out of register
The name sits inside a tilted ring with one small moon on it: something being watched from a steady distance. The letters are heavy and leaning, closer to a racing team than a consultancy.
The ring is printed twice, once in cyan and once in magenta, a few pixels apart, like a screen that hasn't quite settled. Everything else on the site takes its two colours from that slip.
> one body, circling. it recognises the arrangement.
Black, and two signals.
Pure black, pure cyan, pure magenta: the three loudest values a screen can make, with white for reading. Cyan carries the menu and the headings, magenta marks the one word that matters. The two are far enough apart in brightness to tell apart without seeing the hue.
- black#000000the ground
- cyan#00FFFFmenu, headings
- magenta#FF00FFemphasis
- white#FFFFFFeverything you read
- white on black
- 21 : 1
- cyan on black
- 16.7 : 1
- magenta on black
- 6.7 : 1
> two signals on a dark field. it has seen this sky.
Loud, then quiet.
flexible, pragmatic,
No pushy sales, just an opportunity to get answers to your questions.
What is a fractional CISO, and does your business need one?
Montserrat does nearly all of it: bold and lower case for the headlines, regular for the reading. Lower case on purpose. Security copy usually shouts in capitals; this one speaks at a normal volume in a very bright colour.
Prices on the page. Half of it free.
Consultancies hide their prices. This one puts three ISO 27001 tiers on the page with a starting figure under each, a retainer you can sign up to without a call, and a policy pack you can simply buy.
It also says, in plain sight, that half the work is meant to be free: pro bono security support for charities, and a monthly phishing test for any UK charity that asks.
- bronze / gap analysis
- from £2,250
- silver / audit and consultancy
- from £7,000
- gold / managed compliance
- from £18,000 a year
> it charges half of them nothing. it does not explain why. it does not need to.
A second door.
Builtwith is the other half of the house: shops and sites for founders and small teams, on Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce or Etsy, with a partner studio for full identities. Same black, same two signals, a different trade. On a phone the whole site comes down to four buttons along the bottom edge: phone, email, LinkedIn, chat.
> one house, two trades. it sees nothing strange in that.
What it holds.
- pages
- 24
- journal posts on breaches, scams and standards
- 23
- priced tiers, in the open
- 3
- share of the work meant to be free, per cent
- 50
Behind the black there is a booking calendar for the free call, a quote form, retainer plans, a small shop and a journal that explains the week's breach in terms a founder can act on. One of the posts is about Dungeons & Dragons.
> it writes about every break-in it hears of. it does not sleep well.
Still on watch.
The site is live and still being added to. The record stays open.