Essential

Two weeks before launch, Essential had a moodboard, an immovable deadline, and a promise: a first step towards an AI operating system in which anyone could create apps with natural language.

Elodie Fabbri created the identity and website design. nullzwei advised on feasibility and owned the engineering single-handedly, beginning before final layouts existed and adapting as the work changed through the final day.

The site used a custom font loader so each dot in the type could animate independently without breaking line wrapping or accessibility. Film layers used blend modes, while the background processed video into moving symbols that reacted to the cursor. Keeping the background smooth on lower-end devices took as much work as getting the effect right.

The design continued to change until the day the site went live.

Another studio's launch film arrived on release day, and its elements still had to become part of the site. The build was structured to absorb ideas immediately, including a mobile experience composed very differently from desktop, without retreating to a simpler fallback.

The site went live two weeks after work began. Shortly afterwards, Nothing announced a $200 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation.