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Phill Keaney-Bolland· Co-founder and Designer, Yaya2 min readWith Kelly Allen (Opens in a new tab), Co-founder, Unboring, Sara Carty (Opens in a new tab), Co-founder, Unboring
Kelly and Sara start with the thing everyone in the industry sees and few will say plainly. The visual and verbal language of cybersecurity has converged: the same palettes, the same padlocks, the same threat-led fear appeals. Their argument is that this is a failure of nerve rather than a failure of talent.
It is a diagnosis we share. No purple, no plexus, no floating dashboards is not a style preference. It is a commercial position, because a brand that looks like every competitor invites the buyer to compare on price.
Kelly brings over a decade of cybersecurity marketing and a sensitivity to tone, emotion and cognitive load. Sara brings 15 years in high-growth startups and doctoral research in cyber diplomacy. Unboring was built on the belief that different minds produce better stories, and that neurodiverse thinking is an asset in a category that rewards noticing what others skim past.
The pair are careful about where boldness belongs. Creative that startles but does not connect to a real product truth spends attention without buying anything. The test they apply is whether the idea traces back to a genuine value proposition, which is exactly the line between different by design and different for its own sake.
Phill Keaney-Bolland
Co-founder and Designer, Yaya
Co-founder and designer at Yaya, and host of the Cult Products podcast. Fifteen years designing products, brands and UX across multiple industries before narrowing to cybersecurity, and lectures on design at Imperial. Works with cybersecurity founders on positioning, strategy and the website that has to carry a launch, across identity, cloud security, AI agents and software supply chain, including Twine out of stealth and Geordie AI, which won the RSA Innovation Sandbox in 2026.
One of the more useful turns in the conversation is where brand actually shows up. Not the launch film, but the onboarding email, the invoice, the internal comms. These are the surfaces a customer meets repeatedly, and the ones most teams never think of as brand at all.
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