Brand and Website Launch

Ground is a two-person startup building on-chain yield infrastructure for stablecoins. I was brought on as a freelance designer to build their brand and marketing website, working directly with both co-founders.

I ran a few workshops with the founders to put their brand into words. Early on we established that we needed to look different than a lot of the other companies in the field. The founders wanted to lean more Stripe than Crypto feeling.

Once we established our brand values we also found our important questions. Does this look like it belongs in a CFO's browser? Does this instill enough trust for a multi million dollar decision?
There was also a line that stuck with me, “We’re changing the nature of money.”

The logo, type and website structure came together quickly but nailing the visual language took many iterations.

Challenges

• The audience is financial institutions that are managing multi-million-dollar decisions, and my first concepts leaned too close to the crypto and DeFi look
• Ground's product is invisible, so the visual language had to carry the story on its own

Opportunities

• The logo, type and site structure were settled early, so I could spend the time on the visual language
• "Changing the nature of money" gave me an idea to build on: shift how the viewer sees money

My first idea was to take the founders' phrase literally and change the viewer's perspective, using tesseracts and 4D/3D visualization fields. I explored a few reveals. In the end, it was too heady. A CFO doesn't want a physics lesson just to use a website.

So I went looking for how other sites do a perspective shift and found y-n10.com. It reveals 2D turning into 3D (isometric-ish), and it's a great scroll. I realized I could still keep the reveal but drop the overly heady 4D part.

Taking this shift idea I leaned into an electric grid metaphor, since this is the infrastructure money will run on. I built the language from voxels (a little inspired by Minecraft, maybe), which shows how funds move and how new shapes can come out of a simple grid.

What shipped

• Brand: logo, type scale, colors, patterns, deck templates, and brand guide
• Groundtech.co | A multi-page marketing site
• Grid Visualizer, a tool I built (vibecoded) to create on-brand assets