Chainguard

When you really think about it, the Internet is just a bunch of blocks. Containers inside containers inside containers. Bundles of data moving to and fro.

Many of these blocks are open source packages. And surprisingly, the same ones underlying a startup's MVP are also used by global banks, the military, and the largest social media platforms. All of them, to some degree, unaware of the trust they're placing in anonymously published, freely downloadable baskets of code.

Chainguard secures these crucial building blocks, the unglamorous but critical layer most people never think about until something breaks. And that's exactly why they're a unicorn.

But the brand hadn't kept pace with the company. As Chainguard grew from scrappy startup to industry leader, they needed an identity that reflected who they'd become: confident without being arrogant, technical but human, serious about security but not afraid to have a little fun.

They came to me looking for a system that could express all of that and scale with them.

The foundation of the identity is a generative design tool I built that creates endless permutations of these block layouts, but in a way that invites you to play until you find something you love.

It's an embodiment of the idea that software is modular, endlessly rearrangeable. That it can be built, rebuilt, and edited. That it's an act of human creation as much as it is digital infrastructure.

And in the spirit of open source, we've made it public. Go ahead. Play around.

The tool generates precise, programmatic layouts. But not everything should follow the rules 100% of the time. The editor's eye is key.

For certain applications, elements can break the grid or layer in more organic ways, signaling a human touch to prevent sterility and repetition.

It's that tension between logic and intuition that's the signature of a real craftsperson. Great code gets you 90% of the way there. The last 10% is surprise. The mark of taste.

The outputs, though, are just a starting point. That 90%. The last 10% of editing and curating is where the magic happens.

The grid system also extends into a suite of bespoke product icons and spot illustrations, each with its own structure and rules. Scalable enough to work across digital surfaces, yet flexible enough to give every element its own personality.

The modest block. Chainguard is blocky at every level. Layouts, icons, illustrations are all built from the same base unit, reconfigured in ways that feel fresh each time. The same way great software does.

We then brought the identity to life across a full web redesign.

I provided design direction for about a dozen of the highest-traffic, highest-priority pages, establishing templates and patterns flexible enough for the in-house designer to scale across the rest of the site while maintaing quality and cohesion.

Beyond the system, I built an extensive library of iconography, illustrations, UI snippets, diagrams, and infographics.

Security and software supply chain concepts aren't the most intuitive, so it was important to make Chainguard's complexity visual and digestible without dumbing anything down.