Full design for AntSeed, an open peer-to-peer market for AI inference: brand, macOS app, marketing site and motion. All of it had to make sense in the four seconds before someone closes the tab.
AntSeed moves AI requests the way BitTorrent moves files. Providers set their own prices, buyers route by price, latency, reputation or privacy. No aggregator taking a cut, no account to create.
The engineering was already real: a DHT, a routing protocol, on-chain settlement. What was missing was any reason for a normal person to want it. My job was everything outside the protocol: the mark, the app, the site and the films.
The audience splits in two: developers who judge it on architecture, and people who just want their coding agent to cost less. One surface had to serve both without patronising either.
An ant whose legs end in nodes. It is already a graph, so one shape carries the brand, the app icon and the films.
Decentralized products inherit dashboards, node graphs and dark terminals. That reads as "infrastructure" to engineers and "not for me" to everyone else.
The value is invisible. Routing happens in milliseconds, through providers the user never meets, and the saving arrives as an absence: a bill that did not grow.
"Peer-to-peer" and "on-chain" also promise configuration, wallets and risk, while the real job is mundane: point your tools somewhere cheaper and carry on.
Anchor the product to one physical control. The VPR opens on a power button the size of a fist: on or off. A user who understands nothing else understands that.
Then show the money where it is earned. Every model row strikes the official price through against the live one, so the saving is a number, not a headline.
Warm paper, not black glass, with green reserved for what is actually live.
Two full grey passes before anything was styled. Each screen answered one question, and most of what changed was not layout but naming.
Grey lets structure and wording get argued before anyone reacts to colour, and it is the one version a founder and an engineer read the same way.
The pass that mattered most was the money: a credits label, a dollar figure and a separate token with its own Claim button, all fighting for attention. Settling it here was far cheaper than after the visual pass.
One control, one word of state, one default model. The test: can the app be understood with the power control as its only hierarchy?
How much can this screen carry before it stops reading as a switch? Too much. The Popular list pushed it over and moved to its own view.
419 models is a filtering problem first. Recommended lands, All Models waits behind a tab, and Favourites and Recent give the market a memory.
Where delegation gets decided. The Auto toggle sits right above the list it governs, and switching it off hands you Pinned sellers instead of taking something away.
The product's argument is that your setup doesn't change. One identical button per row, so it reads as things that already work, not a setup process.
Auto-routing sends a prompt to a stranger's machine, so the bounds had to be few: two sliders, two toggles. In grey, no control said what it does, which rewrote the shipped version.
Balance, token, usage and history together exposed the problem: a Credits label over a dollar figure, plus a second currency with its own Claim button. Two units, three names, one balance.
A QR code and a signer address: right for wallet holders, a dead end for everyone else. Crypto could not be the front door to paying.
The Virtual Private Router is the product you hold: a macOS app that exposes an OpenAI and Anthropic compatible endpoint on localhost and routes every request across the open market.
A power control and one word of state. Everything below it is optional detail, and the button is deliberately oversized, because its size is the message.
Once traffic flows, a usage strip appears: requests, tokens, saving. Only saving is green, because it is the only figure that answers why the app is open.
Hundreds of models is a filtering problem, so the default view is a short Recommended list. Each row shows the official price struck through against the live band, and one-word badges do the ranking.
With Auto on, the router picks from one list ranked by reputation. Turn it off and a Pinned sellers group appears above the market, so the choice becomes the user's to keep.
The strongest thing AntSeed can say is that nothing changes. Each tool is one Connect button, and on software that sits between a user and their paid tools, the exit is as visible as the entrance.
Auto-routing means a stranger's machine answers your prompt. This screen bounds it with a trust floor, a price ceiling and an opt-in for free peers, because a policy that needs a manual is one nobody sets.
"On-chain and non-custodial" is the sentence that loses a mainstream user. So the screen leads with dollars, puts Credit Card first, and shows how the money gets back out before asking for the first top-up.
antseed.com is a sequence, not a feature list: cheaper, private, unownable, then compatible with what you already use. Each section answers the question the last one raised.
The page opens on the product, not an illustration: the VPR at the centre of a dot field that resolves into the ant mark.
Objections come in the order they occur. Price, because that is why anyone clicked. Privacy, because "peer-to-peer" raises it. Ownership, for who is in charge. Then compatibility, the argument that closes.
One mark, five colors, two typefaces and a single primitive. The app, the site and the films all draw from the same set.
5 tokens: live, mint, void, tint, paper. Green is reserved for state that is actually live.
Geist for everything the user reads. JetBrains Mono for what the protocol says: ports, prices, peer counts.
The ant broken into a dot field. It sits behind the site hero and runs through the films, so the brand reads as texture before it reads as a logo.
Buttons, one-word badges, select, slider, search and toggles, with Disconnect kept visible in red.
One outline set for the sidebar, from VPR to Settings. Ink at rest, green only on the active view.
The product's one primitive, set into a gradient that only appears while the router is on. Everything else stays ink on paper.
The network is live and its numbers are its own. What I can claim is the surface people meet it through.
Making the power button the product paid for itself again and again. It became the sidebar icon, the favicon, three films and the site hero. When a system has one primitive, the rest of the work gets cheaper.
What I would change: I designed the model market before I saw how wide real price bands get. The same model is quoted at four prices from four machines, so that surface wants a distribution, not a single figure. It is the next thing I would rebuild.
Available on the open market through one local endpoint
Independent peers setting their own prices
Designed across the VPR desktop app and its states
Sequenced as one argument, from price to compatibility
Network figures from antseed.com and antscan.co: 82B+ tokens processed and $143K+ settled to providers as of September 2026. They measure the network, not the design.