Vestris — from ratified contract to closing-ready, on autopilot

Just wrapped one-week sprint designing the landing page for Vestris, a YC S26 startup automating mortgage title & closing work. Sharing the process because a few things about it were genuinely different from a typical SaaS landing page project.

The brief

Vestris automates the unglamorous middle of a real estate closing — chasing documents, prorating taxes, drafting closing disclosures, coordinating between lender/agents/title company. The founder wanted the site to feel "homey," not like enterprise software — because the buyers here are mom-and-pop title companies, not enterprise IT departments.

Process

2 hero concepts tested in parallel (a quieter parenthetical headline vs. a bold full-width one), each with copy variants, sent as a single comparison sheet rather than one "final" direction — let the founder react to real trade-offs instead of guessing what I meant.

Redesigned the site's core interactive block — an 11-step "how it works" breakdown — three separate times based on live feedback: first a desktop accordion, then a mobile-specific pass (accordions don't compress well under ~380px), then a full restructure into a 2×2 grid after the client flagged the original zig-zag layout for being "repetitive and too long to scroll."

The illustrated hero background (watercolor countryside, cottage) needed to dissolve into the brand's cream background at the edges — but a standard blur/gradient looked flat next to the painterly art style. Built a small custom tool (canvas + JS) that applies ordered Bayer dithering to fade the illustration into the background color pixel-by-pixel instead of blending — it reads as grain, not gradient, and matches the hand-painted texture instead of fighting it. Turned it into a reusable tool with adjustable fade area, blur radius, dot size, and a transparent-overlay export, so it's not a one-off script.

Figma for design, Framer for the build, custom canvas/JS tooling for the image-edge treatment, Midjourney for the base illustrations.

vestris.ai — live now.