Small update from the Clustta design side: @Linda Ojo has been building out a custom icon library for the app. Not live yet, still a work in progress, but wanted to share some of the process.
There are genuinely great libraries out there, but no single one ever covers everything. Some metaphor you need exists in one pack and is just missing (or awkwardly represented) in another. So up until now we've been cobbling icons together from a few different sources, which works, but it means subtle inconsistencies in stroke weight, corner radius, etc.
Building a custom set fixes that at the root. Every icon shares the same visual language, and if a metaphor we need doesn't exist yet, we just draw it instead of hunting for a substitute. Sharing a preview of where things stand, more to come as this makes its way into the actual product.
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We spent a good chunk of time on the Clustta website going back and forth on tone. There was a real pull to make it feel loud and playful, custom illustrations, quirky copy, that whole energy. But every time we pushed too far in that direction it started working against the product itself.
What we kept coming back to was Notion. It's playful in small doses (icons, tiny illustrations, the occasional line of copy with personality) but the actual interface and messaging stay clean and out of your way. GitHub and Slack were reference points too, since both trust their product to do the talking rather than the marketing page.
So that's where we landed: a site that's calm and direct, with just enough personality showing through (a basketball emoji here, a crossed-out "final final" there) without turning into a distraction. Still tweaking things as we go, but happy with where it's settled for now
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Every creative pro has some "final_v2_client_approved_remastered" file sitting somewhere on their machine. We've been building Clustta (https://clustta.com)for about three years now to make that file (and the ten versions before it) a thing of the past.
The goal was simple: build an artist-friendly collaboration, version control, and asset management tool we love, and one we hope you'll love too.
Most of the challenge was in blurring the lines between technical version control platforms like GitHub and everyday file-sharing apps like Google Drive, so it feels both fresh and familiar to users coming from either camp. That meant constantly figuring out what features to add, where they belonged in the UI, and so on.
Clustta is open source, is available for general use now, and still very much in active development, so I'll be sharing updates here as we keep building 🤞
More updates and case studies coming soon.
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