Nuxt

The scope covered everything visual across the Nuxt ecosystem. The logo, the colours, the landing pages for Nuxt, NuxtLabs, Nuxt Studio, and Nuxt Content, as well as the product design of Nuxt Studio itself.

Approach

The recurring challenge at Nuxt was making the complex accessible. A meta-framework is a code library built on another code library, made of ideas that are hard to picture: rendering modes, hydration, module systems, build pipelines. Being able to visualise them simply was crucial.

Developers choose Nuxt because it makes all of that simple to use, and that simplicity doesn't show on its own. My job was to give it a form across its entire visual ecosystem. That meant the identity, with green gems to evoke the framework's power and efficiency, and the layout, kept clean on both the landing pages and the documentation.

I also designed the NuxtLabs branding. As the company grew, it chose to create a parent structure to manage its different products. Since each already had its own identity, I designed NuxtLabs to be minimal and elegant, so they could keep the spotlight. I ran into the exact same problem a few years later on VoidZero, with the same answer.

Nuxt Studio was the most demanding part. The goal was to let people edit Markdown content visually and dynamically, with as little technical knowledge as possible. For that, I built a design system able to support constructing a product on the scale of a CMS.

Outcome

The 3D green gem I designed was picked up by the community and reused far beyond anything we shipped ourselves.

Three years of designing for developers on a technical product is where I learned to work with this audience, and it led directly to my collaboration with Evan You on Vite and VoidZero. NuxtLabs was later acquired by Vercel.