Colin Spence
Product Designer
Open for hire

Designing the front door for$15M+ in Ethereum public goods funding

    Summary

    I led design across Octant's v2 suite at Golem Foundation and shipped most of it myself: the zero-knowledge voting app, the GLM staking app, a vault admin for Safe, the grantee registry, and an agent-based design system the whole team builds with. Then I designed and built the new octant.build in six weeks.
    Just here for the results?

  • Client

    Octant

  • Role

    Design Lead & Design Engineer
    ui/ux design
    design systems
    internal tooling
    frontend development

  • Timeline

    2026
    Full time, March 2026 to present

  • Category

    web3 app
    decentralized funding

The Challenge

Octant turns Ethereum staking yield into a matching pool that the community allocates through quadratic funding. By 2026 it was five apps from different teams, each with its own visual language, plus a marketing site on a retired CMS. The real risk was that an unfamiliar funding mechanism stayed illegible to GLM holders, treasuries, and grantees while live rounds kept running.

    Design Approach

  • Make a zero-knowledge ballot feel like a simple decision

    Voters sign EIP-712 ballots that a sequencer batches and a ZK prover verifies before contracts pay out. None of that belongs in the flow. I redesigned the round wizard and the ballot so locked GLM and direct WETH read as one choice, then closed roughly ninety launch tickets: absolute amounts, simulation-gated signing, and a staged review before the irreversible submit.

  • Turn the design system into an agent, not a package

    When the shared component library was abandoned, I built Kay, a Claude Code agent that became the brand's source of truth. It bootstraps apps on the Octant preset, audits them against the core rules, and grounds UX reviews in interview-based personas. Its design role then moved into Shannon, the team's verified build loop, so every spike already looked like Octant.

  • One substance, many forms

    Rather than commission renders, I built one illustration system: 8,000 points of light that rearrange into the logomark, an open hand holding an orb, and a galaxy that stands for a funding round. It runs on hand-written GLSL with poses baked from a rigged mesh, and an in-app lab lets the marketing team compose stills and clips for campaigns.

  • Ship octant.build from a Figma prototype in six weeks

    I scaffolded a clickable prototype from thirteen Figma screens, then rebuilt it as a real information architecture with every placeholder number replaced by a sourced one. An in-product commenting layer turned nearly two hundred team notes into triaged Linear issues before the production cutover on 24 August.

  • octant.build home: the hand-and-orb point cloud hero behind the headline.

  • The in-app illustration lab, built so the marketing team can compose stills and record clips for campaigns without a designer.

  • The same 8,000 points settled into the Octant logomark.

  • A round page with the real funds breakdown and leaderboard.

  • The quadratic funding explainer with a live alpha slider between matching and direct funding.

  • Before: vote-round-old
    After: vote-round

    The voting app round page, before and after the redesign.

  • The ballot: absolute amounts, a staged commitment, and one irreversible submit.

  • The post-vote moment, built to be shared.

  • Before: vault-admin-old
    After: vault-admin

    The vault admin portfolio before and after the redesign.

  • The color grammar: gradient chrome for paths, flat fills for facts, peach for action, every pair checked for red-green color blindness.

  • Kay scoring an app against the core rules: tokens, icons, elevation, and recipes, with findings ranked by severity. This run: 1 high, 6 medium, 4 low, and three top fixes.

  • Personas built from user interviews ground every UX audit in a real person, not a checklist.

  • Shannon's prototype mode: the design-system reference every spike starts from, the lifecycle modes, and the verifier that rejects off-brand output.

  • Internal review tool: the team clicks any element on the site, leaves a note, and it lands in Linear as a triaged issue with the screenshot attached.

Results & Impact

Five apps, one design language
Voting, staking, vault admin, registry, and site share one token set and a color grammar checked for color blindness. Roughly ninety launch tickets closed on the voting app alone.
A design system the whole team builds with
Kay bootstraps and audits apps against the core rules, ranking findings by severity (one run: 1 high, 6 medium, 4 low). Shannon rejects off-brand output before a human reviews it.
octant.build live in six weeks, real data end to end
From a static prototype on 20 July to production on 24 August, with nearly two hundred team notes triaged into Linear and every headline figure traceable to a source.

Resources