Three recent launches: Novu, the Databricks Developer Portal, and a Railway launch video

Three projects went live recently, and while they look different on the surface — a homepage redesign, a developer portal, and a launch video — they say something consistent about how we like to work. Here's each of them, and why the details matter.

A new homepage for Novu, four years in

Meet the new Novu and its new homepage. I'm glad to have been part of that journey for four years already.

For anyone without context: Novu is open-source notification infrastructure. It's the layer that handles the emails, in-app bells, push messages, and Slack pings your product needs to send — the kind of thing every team builds badly at least once before deciding to outsource it. Its audience is developers, which means the website has an unusually hard job. It has to be credible to someone who will read your docs before they read your pricing page.

Four years is a long time in that market. Over that stretch, Novu's positioning has moved, the product has grown, the category itself has matured, and the homepage has had to keep pace each time. That's the part I find most valuable about long partnerships: by the fourth iteration, you're not relearning the product, the audience, or the constraints. You already know which sections of the page do the persuading, which ones people scroll past, and what the team means when they say something "doesn't feel technical enough."

A new agency would spend the first month getting to that baseline. We spend it on the actual work.

Databricks Developer Portal: vibe coding, used the right way

Enjoy our recent brand and design project for the Databricks Developer Portal.

There's a detail in this project worth talking about beyond the visuals. While many companies now prefer to fully vibe-code their websites, Databricks used vibe coding the right way — mainly for quick prototyping and for communicating the overall page structure and intent.

If "vibe coding" is new to you: it's the practice of describing what you want to an AI coding tool and letting it generate a working page, rather than writing the code yourself. It's genuinely fast. In an afternoon you can have something clickable in a browser.

The trap is treating that output as the finished website. AI-generated pages tend to be structurally plausible and visually generic — spacing that's almost right, a type scale that drifts, components that don't quite belong to the same family, and accessibility and performance treated as afterthoughts. On a marketing site for a company the size of Databricks, those small inconsistencies read as carelessness, and they compound across every page you add later.

What Databricks did instead was use it as a communication tool. Here's the concrete version of that: imagine you want a developer portal landing page with a hero, a set of product entry points, a code sample that switches between languages, and a docs-and-community section. You can write that in a brief and hope everyone pictures the same thing, or you can generate a rough clickable page in an hour and say "this — this is the shape and the priority order, now make it good." The second option removes an enormous amount of ambiguity before design starts. Nobody argues about whether the code sample belongs above or below the product cards, because everyone has already seen both.

Then the brand and design work happens properly, on top of a structure everyone already agreed on. Prototype fast, design deliberately. That's the sequence that works.

A launch video for Railway, start to finish in under two weeks

Here's the behind the scenes of the launch video production for Railway — from initial request to final release in less than two weeks.

Launch videos have a scheduling problem that's easy to underestimate. The launch date is fixed. The product is often still changing right up to it. And video is the least forgiving format to change late: rewrite one line of narration and you may be re-recording voiceover, re-timing animation, and re-rendering everything downstream of it.

The usual response is to start months early, which doesn't work either, because you end up animating a version of the product that no longer exists by launch day. Two weeks from request to release is only possible if the pipeline is built for it — script, storyboard, 3D and motion, sound design, and revisions all overlapping rather than queued in a strict line, with the sequences most likely to change left flexible until the end.

We've been doing this long enough to have that pipeline, and Railway's team was decisive about feedback, which matters just as much. A two-week turnaround dies the moment approvals sit in someone's inbox for four days.

The common thread

None of these projects were about picking a nicer typeface. Novu needed a homepage that keeps up with a product and a category that keep moving. Databricks needed brand and design work that could absorb fast AI prototyping without inheriting its sloppiness. Railway needed a launch asset that landed on a date that couldn't slip.

Speed and craft usually get framed as a trade-off. In practice, the teams that get both are the ones who put the fast, messy tools where they belong — early, for figuring out what to build — and keep the careful work for what ships.

If you have a launch on the calendar and a site or video that isn't ready for it, get in touch.