smlXL Start-ups & scale-ups
Bringing a company out of stealth with a brand world
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smlXL came to ON in stealth with rigorous engineering and no public face. We brought them out with a compelling, playful digital experience that communicates their ethos — ahead of a $13.4m seed round from a16z, Greylock and other angels, and a path that led to their acquisition by Dune.
smlXL’s goal is to make blockchains more transparent, useful and accessible, with proprietary techniques that leverage blockchain’s transparency for rigorous analysis of bytecode and contracts.
Serious infrastructure, in other words — which is exactly why the brand couldn’t afford to be. The engagement ran lean and agile: web development, foundational SEO and SEM, and analytics wired in from the start.
A brand world built as a tool
The identity isn’t a set of assets — it’s a system that runs. The s/m/l/xl letter pattern renders live in the browser, and a control bar hands it to the visitor: sliders reshape the weave, a die rerolls the composition, a camera captures the state you made. The brand invites the same curiosity the company applies to blockchains — take it apart, see how it behaves.
Every surface draws from the same system. Products, values, careers — each section picks its own palette from the pattern and keeps the canvas running in the margins, so the site holds together without a single static asset doing the work.
Portraits from the same system
The team page runs its members through the brand itself: portraits regenerated as glitched letterform weaves, each one distinct, all of them unmistakably smlXL. The “join us” ask sits inside the experience rather than on a careers template, and the system holds from desktop down to a single-column phone screen.
Out of stealth, on schedule
A brand as playful as the engineering is rigorous, shipped at startup pace.
The site carried smlXL’s emergence from stealth and the announcement of its $13.4m raise. The work was built to move fast — lean scope, foundational SEO and analytics from day one — and to keep generating: every screen the company shipped afterwards drew from the same canvas. smlXL has since been acquired by Dune.