Albacore Incorporated

Albacore builds mass-producible drone submarines for autonomous undersea operations. Its primary vehicle, Ghostfin, supports defense, surveillance, logistics, and ocean-survey missions across long distances. The website needed to explain an unfamiliar product, demonstrate its operational value, and establish Albacore as a credible company within a rapidly developing area of defense technology.

I led the project independently while also working on the Tex Software redesign. The original brief was to create a single page containing everything from company positioning and product specifications to Ghostfin's technology and mission applications. My role expanded across visual direction, UI design, design systems, interaction design, asset production, and development support, while coordinating directly with the client and its internal developer.

Albacore had a limited digital identity and very little finished marketing material, so I began with research, moodboarding, content architecture, and concept screens. I selected Teko Variable and DM Sans as the primary typefaces and created a focused palette of near-black, deep navy, steel blue, vivid light blue, and white. From there, I built a reusable system for typography, spacing, navigation, technical specifications, mission sections, and calls to action.

The visual direction needed to feel technical and defense-oriented without resembling a conventional military contractor. Large typography, underwater environments, technical data, product imagery, and controlled motion positioned Ghostfin as both a physical vehicle and an advanced autonomous system. Because Albacore had limited photography and video, I also coordinated new asset production, gathered material from the client, and brought Felix from 1P3D into the project to create additional product renders.

The most difficult part was that design, copywriting, asset production, and development were all moving simultaneously. I frequently designed ahead of finalized copy, using temporary content to establish hierarchy and keep production moving. At the same time, frequent reviews continued to change the direction and structure of the page. I worked closely with Albacore's internal developer to keep the evolving designs aligned with implementation and to separate foundational system changes from smaller content revisions.

The final launch push required several of the most ambitious interactions to move from concept to production in approximately five days. I created image sequences using GSAP, pinned sections, animated lighting, and interactive product demonstrations. I produced the product video of Ghostfin by texturing, animating, and directing its camera movement in p5.js before compositing the output in Premiere Pro. I also adapted a WebGL globe with a custom texture and height map, turning Ghostfin's ocean-scale range into an interactive visual rather than another technical statistic.

Behind the visible site, I built a Sanity-powered news system that allowed Albacore to publish announcements or link to external coverage without developer support. After launch, I continued working with the team through additional iterations, bug fixes, asset compression, and performance optimization. The number of layered interactions made the site technically demanding, and returning to it over several months taught me how quickly visual ambition can create technical debt when scope, content, and development are all changing together.

This was one of the most demanding client projects I have led independently. It required me to manage a changing scope, external creatives, client expectations, technical limitations, and another major website project at the same time. It strengthened my ability to explain tradeoffs, document design reasoning, protect consistency, and continue moving a project forward under pressure.

I later supported Albacore with investor presentations, one-pagers, advertisements, logos, stickers, and illustrations. I also returned to the website to create dedicated defense and commercial sections showing Ghostfin across different mission scenarios. The result was more than a single landing page. It became a flexible digital system that Albacore could continue expanding as its product, missions, and company evolved.