Introduction
Hiloop
Hiloop is a YC S26 startup in the AI autoresearch infrastructure industry, founded by Karan Brar and my former coworker from Crosswise Thomas Boser
I hopped on a contract the week of June 26 - July 3rd to ship a design sprint ahead of their initial launch. This included 2 design systems (product and brand), a landing page redesign, a product page redesign, and documentation to help them maintain design consistency and improve UX
Check out Hiloop and the live website I designed here: https://hiloop.ai/
Role
Product & Brand Designer
Tools
Claude Design, Figma
Timeline
1 week
Landing Page
I started my contract with Hiloop in their existing landing page, a site which had raw material worth keeping — a hero graphic the founders liked conceptually, a color point of view — but needed real design craft behind it. After the cofounders green-lighted me with full creative latitude, I explored a wide breadth of directions, from cozy and warm to editorial to hyper-modern, mixing Hiloop's desired emotional messaging with references like Linear, Discord, Resend, n8n, Anthropic, Spline, and more. Four initial concepts narrowed to one hybrid, then three refinements, landing on a warm, light-themed identity that balanced the personality from before with the clarity they needed. I finished by polishing the details: an animated nav, the Phosphor icon system, and a hero that traded saturation for delivery.
New
Before
Brand & Product Design Systems
With the landing page settled, I reverse engineered it into a reusable system — turning the one-page brand spec into a bound system of tokens, typed components, and copy-to-start templates. My primary goal at this step was forward thinking past my contract. If the founders had to create a pitch deck or marketing graphic, I needed to leave them with a system to instill consistency and identity.
The product UI was a separate system for a harder job — dense, mono-led, built for run trees and traces, not marketing. I kept the two harmonized where it made sense, but added to this second system when I reached the edges of the first. The product naturally required more extensive components, colors (e.g: statuses), and a different layout than marketing material might ever need.


Product Page Redesign
Finally, my last visual deliverable was the redesign of one of Hiloop's product pages: their run detail view. I specifically chose to redesign this page because it was the one screen that contained two components the founders wanted redesigned (their fork tree and logs UI), it let me genuinely improve the product, and it gave them a working reference for applying the new product design system.
I began not in pixels but by trying to understand the data model — establishing that events are auto-captured while forks are user-created and anchored to a specific run and moment in time — because the layout could only be as clear as my understanding of what it represented. I also tried to understand the user base and what a typical user would want to do on that page and with those components. That drove the central decision: the event series is something you scan and search, not a spatial map, so it belongs in a legible vertical list, while the branching story stays with the fork tree. From there I explored orientation openly — horizontal timeline versus vertical list, a three-column layout versus a VS Code style shell — pressure-testing each against real constraints like laptop screen space and thousand-node scale. The team converged on the terminal layout: a collapsible fork tree, a full-width event series, and a dockable attribute terminal the user can orient themselves. I finished by refining the interactions that make it feel alive — hover-to-expand occurrences, fork-from-here, a resizable dock that pushes content instead of covering it — and propagated every decision back into the design system so it outlives the prototype.

New
Before




