ShelfOS · 2026
Launching a new AI product in one week, without losing the brand behind it.
- Role
- Lead Designer (web & 3D)
- Team
- web developer, copywriter
- Tools
- Figma, Spline
- Timeline
- ~1 week
The challenge
Shelf was launching ShelfOS, an operating system for building and scaling AI agents, and we had about a week to ship the site. To speed up development, we built on a SaaS template as the technical base. My job was to make sure it didn’t look like one, and that ShelfOS felt like a confident new product while staying clearly part of Shelf.
Round one: following the market
The first direction followed AI-native competitors like Decagon: soft purple gradients, centred heroes and floating cards. It looked current, but it could have belonged to any AI startup, and it had nothing in common with the brand Shelf had spent years building.
The pivot: evolution, not revolution
We changed course. Instead of chasing competitors, I went back to Shelf's existing website and built on its DNA: the framed grid, the deep navy, and the orange-to-blue palette from the logo.
Key decisions
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The grid as the brand
Shelf’s original site was built on visible grid lines and framed modules. I kept that structure and refined it with more whitespace, calmer colour and a cleaner type hierarchy, so ShelfOS feels familiar at a glance and new on a closer look. For a product about reliability and control, the structure itself tells the story.
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From illustration to 3D
The old brand relied on flat isometric illustrations. For ShelfOS I created a new set of glass 3D forms in Spline (ribbons, stacked layers, cubes) in the brand gradient, to give abstract ideas like orchestration and data layers a shape.
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One system across every page.
Reusable modules, colour-coded labels (Velocity, Visibility, Performance) and consistent card patterns carry from the homepage through Product, About, Careers and the demo page, so the team could add pages without starting over.
Outcome
The site went from first exploration to launch in about a week, built on a template for speed but with a design system that’s entirely Shelf’s.
