Full Node Design

After eight years as Head of Design at Plume (Series B to unicorn), I ran Full Node Design as a solo studio: brand identity, product design, web, motion, and photography for Bitcoin companies and projects. Product + brand as one system — not a deck and a separate site later. A short studio chapter; portfolio experiments doubled as workflow R&D.

Generative exploration for brand worlds, rapid prototyping in Figma, Cursor-adjacent AI-builder loops, Claude-class passes on copy and component variants. A solo studio only ships at quality when the design engine is peer-ready even if the peer is an agent.

Today's stack for the studio

Each engagement starts with a one-page brief: who the Bitcoin project is for, what it believes, the three things it has to prove. Then come wide, fast directions. Midjourney explores brand worlds in batches against that brief, and a critique wall kills most of them in an afternoon. The two or three that survive become the kit: type, a color scale, logo lockups, and a motion grammar, meaning how things enter, hold, and resolve.

The kit drives everything else. Runway and After Effects turn the chosen stills into loops and launch motion that follow the grammar. The site starts as a sitemap with a one-line brief per section. Those briefs generate the first wireframes, so structure and messaging get argued about before anyone polishes a pixel. Webflow then builds on the kit's variables, and social templates come from the same file. The result is an identity, site, and launch calendar that ship in weeks and agree with each other.

Cursor is the studio's R&D bench. I prototype interface ideas and interactive explainers in code rather than in decks, and that bench led directly into Cognichip. The lesson that carried over: speed only helps when craft sets the limits. Generate widely, then edit hard.