I was Creative Director at Poolside, shaping the brand and experiences outside the IDE and assistant: websites, launches, communications, events and the systems behind them, while Alasdair Monk and Hector Simpson worked on the IDE and assistant.
Poolside is a model lab pursuing AGI through software engineering. The website introduced the company’s direction and helped bring people into the team.
Coming into view
The website matured alongside the company, through several iterations of its vision, ethos and technical direction. I worked closely with Yasmin Pessoa, our primary design engineer. Plenty of cross-pollination between design and code. Another icon system, too; I seem to do a lot of those.
The result made Poolside’s direction clearer, and earned some recognition for its coherence within the design community, including a kind mention from Rauno Freiberg.
With Laguna M, S and XS, we could start demonstrating model competency and its place across the IDE, assistants and agent-orchestration console. The Model Factory’s capabilities gave the company confidence to position Laguna as the open model of the West.
The site brought that technical story together with the product stack, enterprise partnerships and public-sector work. Alongside it, I helped Mariana Castilho with product design for web interfaces, including the agent-orchestration console.
A larger presence
As more of Poolside became public, the brand had more places to be: launches, social channels, technical articles and conversations with partners. I built the systems to keep those expressions connected.
The brand book covered colour, Pantone matches for physical production, typography, graphs and diagrams. The same language carried through the site and a growing social presence.
I extended it into a company-wide pitch-deck system, with slide formats for research, product, partnerships and leadership. Enough variety for people to tell their own story without starting from scratch.
As we shared more of the research, I worked with founding engineer Joe Rowell on the editorial direction of the Model Factory series. Heavily technical articles, with diagrams and visuals designed to help readers follow the ideas.
The presence grew beyond screens, too. I produced an extensive merchandise library for employees and enterprise executives alike, with stickers made alongside Prekesh Chavda.
For AWS re:Invent, I directed the booth with the ASTOUND Group, alongside decks, special merchandise and video for the LED boards; Prekesh handled After Effects. The identity had to work at the scale of a conference hall.
Canopy
I led the team on Canopy, the beginning of a new direction for the brand, bringing its identity into code. We explored component systems and an evolving identity, with visuals intended for reuse across web, social, presentations and Open Graph images.
The aim was to see how agents could assemble materials from a prompt and reduce routine production work. Alongside it, we explored a component library around AI work, including evaluation charts and Model Factory interfaces. It pointed towards a broader set of tools for people building with AI.