The 2023 Vercel Home page redesign was a drastic change from what we used to have. In 2023, our pages weren’t very cohesive story-wise and aesthetically. Some pages used colorful gradients whereas others were black and white, typography was inconsistent and there wasn’t a strong visual motif that reinforced that “this is Vercel”.
Glenn Hitchcock was the lead designer on the project. He explored several concepts but we eventually landed on the grid motif. We felt that grid lines were beautifully illustrative of the Swiss design movement and loosely tied together with the concept of developer tooling, surfacing the “raw exposure of the creative process”. The Home page has changed a lot since. Our initial theme and h1 for the hero was “What will you ship?”; a slightly curious prompt that we love to see has inspired many others.
We worked together with our VP of Design, Alasdair, several Design Engineers such as myself, Henry Heffernan, Yasmin Pessoa, John Phamous, and many others. The core group was kept small from the beginning. This set us up to really own the story and design.
The Home page itself I think took several months to conceptualise, design, and engineer. The design was implemented, and we learned new things from implementing it, and changed the design. Rinse and repeat. From there on we expanded to revamping several existing pages and creating new ones to further tell the story of Vercel’s product suite. In total, I believe we shipped over 10 visually distinct pages over the course of a year, reinforced by the grid aesthetic.
Keep in mind that at that time LLM-s were not at a point to produce any production code so a lot of it was “hand-crafted”. Our bar thanks to Glenn for the pages was also very high. Unique hero treatments, bespoke product illustrations balancing realism and visual flourish, special attention to accessibility and interaction, and more.
The grid aesthetic was rolled out over to 90% of the site and the Home page redesign was actually linked to updates to our design system, Geist. We had a new typeface created in collaboration with Basement and a completely redesigned icon set. In hindsight, a lot of pieces came together at once to really give us a new foundation to build on.
At that time I truly felt like I was doing the best work of my career. It was a beautiful project to have been part of. Here are some humans that I remember helping contribute to the Home page. I probably missed some…
Glenn Hitchcock Alasdair Monk Henry Heffernan Yasmin Pessoa Elliot Johnson Emil Kowalski Evil Rabbit Genny Davila Greta Workman Guillermo Rauch Hannah Gates John Phamous Lee Robinson Morgane Palomares Peri Langlois Shu Ding Thom Crowe
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