🎯 My Role at Glitch House

At Glitch House, I was responsible for everything design, leading the core experience end-to-end across iOS, Android, and Web. I was shaping the product from both sides: defining what we built, why it mattered, and when it was ready, while also deciding how it should look, feel, and work.

Interfaces, flows, motion, brand, all of it tied together. Classic 0 → 1 chaos: fast, nonlinear, full of small, defensible decisions.

Beyond the craft, I led frontend execution by hiring and mentoring a remote intern team and working closely with a lead developer to ship across all platforms. My role was cross-functional, often requiring fast decisions on scope, sequencing, and implementation — always balancing quality with what we could ship, and when.

🎨 Brand identity: A playful brand for serious tinkering

The glitch house audience? You know them when you see them. Students with 3D printers in their bedrooms. Tinkerers building LED cube setups on their kitchen table. Indie devs who hang out in Discord threads, scroll r/diyelectronics. It had to speak to people who build with their hands, the curious, the obsessive, the always-mid-project kind.

While exploring different styles, I found myself returning to retro tech. Glitch is about real-world builds: components, circuits and not just pixels on a screen. The old-school texture of terminals, 8-bit fonts, and chunky UI gave me a visual direction to build on. I pulled from glitch art, brutalist layouts, old hardware manuals, and low-res interfaces.

This was the fun part. Big, unapologetic pixel fonts. Bold colors on dark UI. Sharp corners everywhere. I refused to round anything (regret came later). Intentional imperfections: missing pixels, janky shadows, but no fake-glitch RGB split filters. I leaned into using lots of emojies, colorful tags, and icons with personality, to speak the visual language this audience lives in. I kept the copy tone straightforward and a little self-aware, for someone who knows how to solder but also meme.

⚙️ Product Design: Bringing the joy of tinkering

Building a hardware project is currently a fragmented process, and so we needed to design a single source of truth that would guide a maker from a flash of inspiration to a finished, working project. My goal was to design a cohesive, end-to-end experience I wish I'd had: one clear, easy to understand path from a spark of an idea to a thing that actually works.

To achieve a seamless experience across iOS, Android, and Web, we also needed a flexible design system that would not only ensure consistency but also lay the groundwork for future product expansion.

🏁 Our Onboarding Flow: A Personal Starting Line

With countless projects to pick from, the hardest part was choosing. Our solution? A personal roadmap to cut through the noise and offer a clear starting point. Through a quick onboarding flow, we get to know the user's taste in projects, skill level, and even the parts they have lying around.

We use this data to seed a recommendation engine that learns from their choices, instantly curating a list of projects that are not just inspiring, but actually achievable for them.

🔍 Discovery on Your Own Terms

The payoff for onboarding is immediate: a home feed with "Top Picks For You." But we know makers love to wander, So we designed a discovery experience that’s flexible, letting you browse freely whether you're just looking for a spark or have a specific part in mind. The goal is simple: find your next project, minus the friction.

📋 The All-in-One Blueprint

Too often, building a project means piecing together instructions from scattered and disconnected sources. To solve this, we designed the project page to be the single source of truth—a blueprint that respects a maker's time and energy.

The page breaks down a project's complexity into digestible pieces so you know exactly what you’re getting into. We organized every facet of the project to answer three core needs: the inspiration for why you should build it, a practical roadmap for what you need and how to build it, and crucial community support for when you get stuck.

🔧 Exploring parts

We designed the component explorer to bring instant clarity to a project's full parts list. The strategy was simple. We started by splitting the parts list into clear groups to distinguish what you need to buy versus what you can find or make. This alone eliminates most of the guesswork. From there, detailed views for every part confirm compatibility, while direct links clear the path to acquiring them.

🗺️ A Guide You Can Actually Trust

The enemy of a successful build is context-switching—jumping between a video, a schematic, and a dozen browser tabs. This chaos drains energy and invites mistakes. We designed our guide to bring deliberate calm to the process.

It works by breaking the entire build into focused, manageable steps. Each step provides the right files and parts, but crucially, it also includes clear verification checkpoints so you’re never left guessing. This transforms the build from a stressful guessing game into a satisfying process that keeps the focus where it belongs: on the joy of making.

Glitch House is launching soon on iOS, Android, and Web. This was just the highlight reel—there’s much more under the hood. If you’d like to hear more in-depth details, feel free to reach out. There’s simply too much to cover or showcase here. glitch.house

Bonus: Poetry Camera 📸

Poetry camera by kelin was one of our key inspirations while building glitch house. We spent New Year’s making our own version, and learned so much along the way, from hardware basics to how to make the process easier for fellow builders. It was such a fun, fulfilling build.