# Nucleus > Fake traffic and bots plague web3, but every serious project still needs real users and paying customers. That's the gap Nucleus fills. - Year: 2026 - Disciplines: Identity, Product - Role: Sole designer—brand, product, and motion - Designer: Rafael Cespedes (https://rafaelcespedes.com) Fake traffic and bots plague web3, but every serious project still needs real users and paying customers. That's the gap Nucleus fills. Their platform matches quality users with projects that need them, rewarding genuine contribution and reputation over empty noise. Although simple on the surface, the engine powering Nucleus is extremely robust. It handles the collection, processing, and analysis of user data, patterns, and behaviors to generate scores that match users to appropriate projects. It then uses this data and AI to extract actionable insights, guiding projects toward building strong communities and acquiring paying users. This complexity doesn't need to be front and center, but it had to remain at the core of everything we did. It's what sets Nucleus apart. The brand identity and site design aim to strike a balance between highly technical and highly inclusive: demanding seriousness while still feeling approachable. I was responsible for the entire design lift, executed over a few weeks in a hackathon style, leveraging open source resources (like google fonts) and AI assistance where it made sense. ## Nucleus *nu·cle·us* As defined by Merriam-Webster: *"a central point, group, or mass about which gathering, concentration, or accretion takes place"* The mark starts with a geometric sphere as the atomic unit, the core. A cube wraps around it to represent the environment: a form that scales with meaning. At a macro level it references web3 as a whole; at a micro level, the data, patterns, and insights surfaced within the platform. The negative space formed by the cube overlapping the sphere hints at what lives beneath the surface, Nucleus's ability to look under the hood. It's what separates the mark from a simple icon. ## Brand and visual language Nucleus is a highly technical product. The brand needed to reflect that without becoming cold or purely functional, and it needed to hold up without a dedicated designer, since the team is small. The foundation is a dark surface with sharp lines, which sets the technical tone. Everything else works against it. Data-driven graphical elements add energy and give the brand something ownable. A generative stippling library introduces an analog, almost tactile quality, and it scales: new stippled imagery comes out of the system rather than starting from scratch each time. When the team needed launch assets, that system became [Nengine](https://rafaelcespedes.com/nengine), a tool for making them on brand without a designer. ## Color and motion The palette is playful, the sharpest departure from the dark foundation. Color appears rarely across the brand and UI, reserved for accents and CTAs so it stays a signal rather than a surface. Motion studies ran alongside the initial batch but were held back from launch to keep the first release tight. The system carried forward and shipped in a following engagement. ## Designing for a technically literate audience The same principles that shaped the brand carried into the site. Nucleus runs a lot of systems in parallel, and the design challenge was consolidating that into as few pages as possible without hollowing out the content. The experience needed to feel streamlined, but not sparse. Users should sense the depth without being confronted by it. Web3 users skew technically literate. That gave us room to lean into a denser, more deliberate aesthetic and move past the gradients and soft UI that dominate most of the space. The visual language is dark, structured, and precise, reflective of the data and infrastructure the product is built on. The result is an interface that's easy to navigate without feeling reduced. The complexity is there. It's just organized. ## User acquisition and intital user data ingestion Organic user acquisition is hard. Referral systems are a classic solution, but they typically optimize for volume, not quality or fit. In web3, where the cost of participation is often zero, that gets exploited fast. We designed a system to address this. By default, users receive 3 referral slots: 2 unlocked and 1 bonus slot that only activates when the user connects all required accounts (X, Discord, Email, Telegram, and at least one wallet). These connections let Nucleus immediately deliver value through opportunities and analytics. When a referral link is used and a slot is claimed, it locks permanently until the referee completes the same account connections. The referrer has full visibility into their referee's progress. The friction is intentional: it filters out low-quality signups and ensures every new user enters the platform with enough data for Nucleus to be useful to them from day one. Once the referee completes all requirements, the slot unlocks and the referrer can invite someone new. The users referral score is used to calculate the users standing in Nucleus own self-hosted launch campaign. ## Connecting users to opportunities The primary benefit to users on Nucleus is the ability to leverage their off-chain and on-chain reputation to participate in campaigns hosted by projects looking to acquire quality users. We needed a campaign page that was easy to understand but flexible, since every campaign is configured differently. Requirements, rules, rewards, distribution, duration, and eligibility criteria can vary drastically across projects. Visibility into participant rankings was also a priority. Knowing where you stand relative to other participants encouraged engagement and surfaced connections between users that wouldn't have existed otherwise. For the layout, we borrowed structural conventions from social platforms like X. That familiarity lowered the learning curve without compromising information hierarchy. Despite the density of campaign-specific content, the page scaled cleanly across varying configurations without requiring users to relearn the interface. ## Images and video - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/01_nucleus-logo_02.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/02_nucleus_mockup_01.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/05_nucleus-graphics_06.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/03_nucleus_mockup_04.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/nucleus_graphic_12.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/07_nucleus-graphics_07.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/carousel/06_nucleus-graphics_08.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/nucleus-logo-mark.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/02_nucleus-graphics_01.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/04_nucleus_graphic-banner_04.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/05_nucleus_graphic_11.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/nucleus_graphic_20.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/vid_nucleus-dots-bars.mp4 - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/06_nucleus_home_03.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/07_nucleus_referral-UI.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/08_nucleus_mobile_03.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/09_nucleus_mobile_01.webp - https://rafaelcespedes.com/projects/nucleus/case-study/10_nucleus-graphics_08.webp --- From the portfolio of Rafael Cespedes. Everything about him in one file: https://rafaelcespedes.com/llms-full.txt · Updated 2026-11-08