Console is startup I joined back in November of 2023 as the Founding Product Designer and hire #2 outside of the co-founders.
It's backed by Thrive Capital and is working alongside some fantastic design partners like Calendly and Vercel. At it's most simple level, Console is using AI to help IT teams triage their support request pipeline. I joined to help the co-founders and early team shape, and ultimately build, v1.0 of the product.
Fast forward 10 months and we've built that early version of the product with the help of some fantastic alpha users. But as we enter into talks with more design partners and early beta users, we needed to stand up a website so we at least look like we exist when we introduce ourselves to new friends and partners.
The problem? We don't have a brand.
At least not a developed one. We have a logo type that we really like but outside of that, we've tried to stay relatively neutral in terms of "brand design" until a time when we can afford to put some real effort into it.
This doesn't just stop at visual design either. It extends to our messaging as well. Though the product is simple enough to explain (I gave you the 1-sentence version in the Background section of this case study), the way that we frame the product in the context of the market, our competitors, and our users is all but non-existent. We don't know what sort of story we want to tell yet, because we've only just begun to discover what the product can be.
However, this website forced our hand. Like it or not, it became Phase 0 of what may eventually be the Console brand. Here's how it went down.
As I started to wrap my head around our formless brand, the first thing I wanted to do was craft a persona of the IT professional we were serving. To spare you the branded language BS, how about I just show you a picture?
I used Visual Electric to generate some portraits and, after a few failed attempts at prompt-writing, I finally found something that seemed to embody the sort of person we were serving.
Next, I wanted to start riffing on some design patterns that I thought formed an interesting cross between the technical web of org charts, access policies, and IT infrastructure and this abstracted, minimal, AI canvas that we created called The Playbook.
From the get-go, I felt like orange would be our accent color. Specifically, an orange similar to the iconic astronaut suits from the 1960's. It felt bold and, in that boldness, there was a simplicity. A singular focus like it knew who it was and where it was going. We're building something ambitious at the dawn of a new era and at the heart of it is complex, thoughtful, world-class engineering. I don't know, I was just getting some strong NASA vibes.
Piggybacking off of the bold simplicity of the high-vis orange, I wanted our design to feel minimal and yet technical. I took inspiration from graph paper with its dashed and dotted grids and old technical diagrams.
Paired with some more modern UI elements like subtle glows and mono-width fonts, eventually as I iterated, shared with the team, and iterated some more, some semblance of a cohesive look and feel began to take shape. It was time to start designing the landing page.
I knew my first pass wouldn't hold up against a light breeze but you have to just push some pixels at some point so I roughed out some super loose ideas, that felt like they had legs. Ultimately, they all seemed to be lacking depth and soul.
I played around with adding some textured shadows in the background...
...and even contemplated a dark mode at one point (I had to, sorry 🤷).
After working with our CEO quite a bit to dial in the "story" of the home page and the associated UI that we wanted to feature, we finally landed on a design we were happy with.
When it came time to build it, I used Webflow since I'd had the most experience with it over the years and knew I could get something built in a couple of days. I built a lightweight design system mapping my Figma variables to Webflow variables and was able to built the site from scratch in just shy of 2 days. You can check out the final build at console.co.
Now, I've learned my lesson to not hold on too tightly to your designs. I fully anticipate that this will change within the next year as we begin to make some strides toward a robust Console brand but I'm glad I got to share a bit of the behind-the-scenes of Console's first landing page.