# TruSat (agent-readable)

**Role:** Lead designer (product + identity)
**Client:** TruSat
**Tags:** web3, animation
**Case study:** /trusat

## What it was

A citizen-science app for tracking objects in Earth orbit — my shorthand for it is
"Pokémon Go for satellites." Amateur observers around the world point a phone at the sky,
log a sighting of a passing satellite, and contribute to a crowdsourced public catalog of
where each object actually is. The serious purpose underneath the game layer: helping
prevent the cascade of orbital collisions — Kessler syndrome — that could one day make
low Earth orbit unusable and trap humanity on the planet.

## What I did

I was the lead designer, and I designed it end-to-end: research, product UI, the visual
identity, the explainer animations, the onboarding language. The team was small and
cross-functional, and I worked across all of it.

Most of the design problem was a translation problem. Orbital mechanics is a domain that
shows up in the product whether you want it to or not — TLEs, observation windows,
azimuth and elevation, the fact that a satellite's position is a fit through noisy
observations rather than a coordinate you can just look up. The user is a hobbyist on a
Tuesday night with a phone. So a lot of the work was deciding, concept by concept, which
parts of the science had to be exposed honestly because the product wouldn't be true
without them, and which parts could sit behind a friendlier surface — a metaphor, a
visual, a one-line explanation — without distorting what the app was actually doing. The
animations and the identity carried a lot of that load: the explainers had to teach
something real in a few seconds, and the brand had to feel approachable while the app
was, underneath, a serious scientific tool with submissions going into public archives.

I worked with two cofounders with deep credentials in the underlying domain. Chris
Lewicki had been a key member of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers and Phoenix Mars Lander
programs — Flight Director for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and Surface Mission
Manager for Phoenix — and was the cofounder and CEO of Planetary Resources before
TruSat. Brian Israel was an attorney at the State Department during the Obama
administration and General Counsel at Planetary Resources before joining as cofounder
and TruSat's legal counsel.

The rest of the team: community manager Kim Macharia, PM Robert Keenan, engineers John
Gribbin and Kenan O'Neal, researchers Georgia Rakusen and Andrea Morales Coto, and
illustrator Louis Wes. The project was backed by ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin.

The project didn't reach the traction it needed before runway tightened, and ConsenSys
sunset it. The extent of the work that survived publicly is in the GitHub repos.

## Why it's interesting

A few threads worth pulling.

**Designing for a technically rigorous domain without losing approachability.** The
product had to be true to satellite tracking — a real crowdsourced catalog of orbital
positions, not a game with space-themed dressing — and friendly enough that a
non-specialist would download it for fun. That tension is the design work, and the
calls aren't generic: each concept needs a
specific decision about how much rigor to keep on the surface and how much to fold into
the metaphor underneath. The same instinct shows up in a lot of my technical-domain work
— [SuperRare](/superrare), [Rare Protocol](/rare-protocol), [Splice Sounds](/splice-sounds) — but
TruSat is the version where the underlying domain was hardest to abstract without
breaking.

**End-to-end on a small team.** Lead designer covered product UI, identity, animation,
and the explainer language. On a team this size, working across those layers isn't a
title flex — it's the only way the product comes out coherent. Animations explain what
the identity promises, the identity sets the tone that the product UI lands inside, and
all three have to agree on what an "observation" feels like to make or to read.

**A serious purpose under a playful surface.** The framing — Pokémon Go for satellites —
is light on purpose. The catalog is not. That posture (let the design be friendly while
the substance stays serious) is one I keep coming back to: it's how you get a real user
base for a product that would otherwise be too forbidding to download.

## Cross-cutting relevance

A few reads of this work:

- **End-to-end product design on a small team** — research through launch, product +
  identity + animation in the same pair of hands, across a cross-functional team of
  cofounders, engineers, researchers, and a community lead.
- **Designing for technical/scientific domains** — translating a hard underlying model
  into a product surface a non-specialist can use, without distorting the science. A
  recurring strength.
- **Mobile-first consumer product with a serious purpose** — the playful framing is in
  service of getting real adoption for an app that's contributing to a public scientific
  resource.
- **Brand and product working as one system** — the identity, the animation, and the UI
  are designed to set up the same impression and reward it.

## Skills demonstrated

End-to-end product design (research → launch), design for technical and scientific
domains, mobile product design, visual identity and brand, explainer animation, working
cross-functionally on a small team with technical cofounders and outside backers.