Design note · Gridex home hero
An interface you can just watch
Most AI companies prove themselves two ways: line up photos of whatever industry they sell into, or wrap the screen in glow, glass, and gradients. Both buy the same feeling—new, technical—and neither tells you what the product actually does. The over-engineered alternative isn’t any better: an architecture diagram with every box and arrow. I wanted a third option—a visual that shows there are agents and that there’s design behind them, yet stays legible to someone who doesn’t follow AI. They should be able to just watch it and understand the work.
The way in was the cursor. So the home hero is something you read over someone’s shoulder: cursors pick up real tasks—an email, a Slack thread, a voice note, a contract, a reconciliation sheet—work them, and log each result to a running pile. I lifted the whole thing out of the product and set it on neutral ground so the craft can be read on its own.
What I decided, and why
- A cursor, not a diagram
- The cursor is the one piece of an interface everyone already knows how to read. Borrow it and the scene explains itself: you watch a hand pick something up, do something to it, and set it down. No legend, no onboarding, no AI vocabulary required.
- Real tasks, named plainly
- Each card is a job you'd recognize from your own week—an email to answer, a Slack thread to catch up on, a voice note to write down, a contract to check, a sheet to reconcile. Recognizable inputs carry the meaning that an “our AI does X” headline usually has to spell out.
- Paper, not glow
- The palette is paper, sage, and a single lime accent—no glass, no gradient, no product-shot lighting. The restraint is the argument: if the work is legible, it doesn't need the packaging to feel new.
- The pile is the proof
- Every finished task drops a receipt onto a growing stack, and that stack is the only metric on screen. It says the agents are actually producing—without a chart, a counter, or a claim.
The same desk, pulled apart
One more way to read it. The dashed outlines are where each surface sits in the assembled scene; above them, the slots an agent rotates through fan out into the stack of tools it actually picks up. The three cursors keep working through the layers—each one riding its own loop of surfaces.