Continuous Composites
The next dimension of innovation.
A deep-tech startup in North Idaho, inventing a way to 3D-print with continuous carbon fiber. For four years I designed the language that helped it look ready for aerospace buyers and investors, from the logo to the interface meant to run its printing robot.
- Role: Founding Designer
- Employee: #4
- Years: 2017–2021
- Award: ADDY 2020
$25M+
Raised, with the brand behind it
ADDY
B2B Website, 2020
Nobody had printed with continuous carbon fiber before.
CF3D, or Continuous Fiber 3D Printing, prints with continuous strands of carbon fiber instead of layers of plastic, with no mold and no autoclave. Buyers, investors, and recruits had to trust a startup in North Idaho with something they had never seen.
Printing an airfoil in free space, with no mold underneath it.
The buyers
Aerospace and industrial companies don't bet on a company that looks like a garage experiment.
The investors
A brand-new technology had to look like a business worth funding.
The recruits
Engineers had to see a company worth joining, before they'd seen the product.
The brief
Look and smell like money.
That was the whole brief. A new company had to look like it belonged next to the established names in composites, wherever someone met it.
01
Look established
An identity that could stand with the biggest names in the industry and still be its own.
02
Teach something new
Show the company's vision, and explain CF3D to a broad audience.
03
One visual experience
One design language across every medium, from the website to the trade show booth.
Product photography I shot for the brand.
One design language for every surface.
I started with the mark, then wrote the rules down. The style guide set color, type, buttons, and texture, each in a light and a dark version. Anyone building on the brand had the rules in one place.
A mark you could print
A 3D shape in a 2D mark, and a real object the technology could print. The wordmark uses flowing lines for a sense of continuous motion.
The rules, written down
The website style guide set a type scale in Helvetica Neue and Open Sans, every style in a light and a dark version, plus buttons, form fields, and a noise texture for gradient backgrounds.
View the style guide (PDF, opens in a new tab)
Coastal Blue
#00BBFE
The primary accent, used sparingly.
Midnight Blue
#091E31
The complement to Coastal Blue.
Ultra Violet
#0904E2
Links and text accents on light backgrounds.
Off White
#EDEDED
Blocks on white. Never for text.
It was my first design system.
I didn’t call it that yet. Years later at Angel, I built Photon on the same idea: one set of rules, written down, shared by everything that ships.
See PhotonThe website
From the whiteboard to an ADDY.
The site had to explain what was happening at 215 E Lakeside to the whole industry. Allie Hambling led creative direction and content. The layout started on a whiteboard with the team, and I designed the site, built it in Webflow, and shot its photography.
The same language on a phone: About, Technology, and the menu.
An interface to run the printing robot.
An early exploration: a touchscreen interface for the operators running the robot. It had to pull part files from a database, send them to the robot, watch every sensor on the print head, and show what resources were on board.
The whole app, mapped
I mapped the whole app as one flow: every path from the dashboard to a finished print, and what the robot and the operator do when a print pauses, stops, or fails. Camera footage, notes, the print log, and part labels each have a place in it.
01
Safety before control
A pre-flight check of every sensor and drive has to pass before the controls unlock.
02
Read it at a glance
Bold colors, large panels, and big touch targets, for an operator who needs to act fast.
03
Pared down to the job
The user flow went through several rounds, then got cut back to only what an operator needs.
04
Built to ship in stages
Controls first, then a database of every print log. Camera recording, barcodes, and reprints were planned as smaller rollouts.
I designed it with Kyle Cummings and Josiah Coad on the backend and Elisha Coad on the frontend. The team built and tested it in R&D to prove the concept. Then the company shelved it to focus on other work.
What the work helped make possible
Design wasn't the only reason, but the brand helped a small startup in North Idaho get taken seriously by investors and by companies like Siemens, Güdel, Saint-Gobain, and Lockheed Martin.
$25M+
Raised in capital.
ADDY
Award for B2B Website, 2020.
4 yrs.
As employee number four.
It drew the attention of
Looking back
It was the Wild West. We were building a technology no one had pursued before, and I learned that one person alone can’t shape a brand. It takes a group of people chasing the same goal.
- Team
- Allie Hambling, creative direction and content. Kyle Cummings and Josiah Coad, backend development. Elisha Coad, frontend development.
- My role
- Identity, web design and development, product design, print, iconography, photography, and videography.
- Tools
- Sketch, Adobe XD, Webflow, InVision, Lucidchart, Jira, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign.
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