Coderhouse: Visual System for 60+ Course Covers

Coderhouse is an Argentine online education platform founded in 2014. It teaches digital skills through live online courses in programming, data, design, marketing and AI, with more than 500,000 graduates across Latin America. It was part of Y Combinator in 2020.

Coderhouse’s founder reached out to me directly on Contra after seeing my work. The company had just gone through a strong rebrand by a leading Argentine studio, built around one idea: the horizon. The “O” in the logo is a sun rising over horizon lines, and the whole palette is named after the hours of a day, from dawn to ember.

The new identity was already live on their website and Instagram, but the course thumbnails in the app hadn’t caught up. They used gradients with no real logic, and category colors had been assigned at random, including a green for Data and a cold grey for Business, both outside the new palette.

The goal was to bring the impact of the rebrand to 60+ course covers, in a way their own design team could keep producing quickly, consistently and at low cost.

These are some of the directions presented to the founder. We wanted to see a range, with and without imagery, from pure typography to 3D objects and photographic scenes. Several looked good, but the final choice had to pass one test: could anyone on their team replicate it for every new course without making design decisions case by case?

Each cover is a single real object in the brand orange, wrapped in warm clouds, a sky that extends the horizon concept into every course. The object identifies the course and the label color identifies the category. Title, background and typography stay fixed, so only the object changes.

The clouds also do a lot of the unifying work. I delivered a cloud library so the team can vary them across categories and keep the catalog from feeling repetitive.

The brand already describes itself as a day on the horizon, so I organized the category colors the same way: a sunset arc, from morning amber to night indigo. Data went from green to coral, Programming was unified with the official orange, and Business moved from cold grey to a warm neutral. I also flipped the labels so the strong color fills the pill, which makes categories easier to read at a glance.

Objects are generated in Gemini with a fixed JSON prompt where only the subject changes: a clipboard for Excel, pipes for Data Engineering, a piggy bank for Personal Finance. Color, angle, lighting and background stay locked, so every object belongs to the same family.

Alongside the Figma template and a cloud library, I delivered an interactive production manual: one guide that takes the team from the system logic to the final export, with every value one click away from being copied.

It covers:

How the system works: one object, one light, one color per category

The prompt: the official JSON and the golden rules for generating objects

Step-by-step production: from Figma to the final cover in 8 steps

Cloud variations: a different sky for each category

File naming: web-ready names for every course

Color system: the sunset palette and the reasoning behind it

Object per course: all 60+ courses, each with its subject ready to paste

What started as a system for course thumbnails became part of the Coderhouse identity. Today it runs across the app, the main website, workshop banners and Meta ad campaigns, and the team has extended it to career programs and new courses on their own.

60+ courses · 7 categories · 1 prompt · app, web, ads