Marketing surfaces for a protocol that needed to look less like a protocol

Arca is an open-source infrastructure protocol. They had a working marketing site, but everyone they hired into engineering would visit it and gently ask if they could re-do it. The team was using “looks like a Stripe knockoff” as informal feedback in PRs.

The brief

We took on three deliverables across an 11-week engagement:

1. A marketing site that didn’t look like a Stripe knockoff
2. A reusable component library that the marketing site, the docs site, and the upcoming onboarding flow could share
3. Visual direction for the docs (Arca picked up the implementation; we set the system)

The hardest constraint: their CTO wanted “tasteful but readable on a 240ppi monitor at 4am after a long shift.” That ended up being more useful as a brief than the actual brief.

Approach

We built the system mono-first. Code blocks are first-class citizens; running text supports them. The display type is large and tight, the body is a slightly taller-than-default mono-aligned sans, and the accent is a single saturated orange #F5A623 that we applied carefully — only on calls to action and inline emphasis, never as a background.

The component library is 28 components. Internal Arca PRs now import from it instead of recreating buttons in CSS. The team has a Slack channel to request additions and a quarterly review where we prune what stopped getting used.

The outcome

Marketing site conversion (free signup) ran at 41% above the prior baseline in the first quarter post-launch. The CTO’s “4am” test gets cited in design reviews as the bar for any new surface that ships. Two months in, the engineering team adopted the same component vocabulary inside the product itself — which was always the plan, but rarely actually happens.