🎯 My Role at Glitch House

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.

After exploring several styles, I landed on an 8-bit, retro-tech aesthetic. The core strategy was simple: Glitch House is about real-world builds made of components and circuits. The pixelated style was the perfect metaphor for this building-block nature. I built on this foundation with inspiration drawn from glitch art, brutalist layouts, old hardware manuals, and the distinct texture of low-res terminal interfaces.

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

⚙️ Product Design: Bringing back the joy of tinkering

Building a hardware project is almost always a fragmented process. My goal for Glitch House was to design the end-to-end experience I wish I'd had: one clear, easy 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.

🏁 Onboarding Flow: A Personal Starting Line

With countless projects to choose from, the biggest hurdle for a maker is often just getting started. 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 components 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 chasing for a spark of inspiration or have a specific component you want to use. 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.

This 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 Components

We designed the component explorer to bring instant clarity to a project’s full component list. The strategy was simple: organize everything by its function and role in the build process. This gives an immediate sense of what each item is for, whether it’s something to plug in/assemble with, or just grab from around the house. That structure alone removes most of the guesswork. From there, detailed views for every part confirm compatibility, while direct links clear the path to acquiring them.

This design also serves as the V1 for a more powerful feature on our roadmap: a comprehensive 'Bill of Materials' (BOM) that supports advanced specs, part comparisons, and viable alternatives.

🗺️ A Guide You Can Actually Trust

The enemy of a successful build is context-switching, jumping between a video, to a schematic, and to a dozen browser tabs. This chaos drains energy and invites mistakes. Our goal was to design a guide that cuts through the noise and helps makers achieve a state of flow.

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 and there’s much more under the hood (the technical trade-offs, the edge cases we solved for, and the cross-functional decisions that brought it all to life). If you’d like to hear more in-depth details, feel free to reach out.

Bonus: We built a Poetry Camera 📸

Poetry camera by kelin was a huge inspiration. The moment we saw it, we knew we had to build one from scratch! We spent New Year's weekend learning everything firsthand from the joy of a successful solder to the frustration of a missing part. It was such a fun, fulfilling build, and every lesson made Glitch House a better, more thoughtful product.