Nicolás Bañados, Head of Design at LunarCrush

I lead design at LunarCrush and I build what I design: the product, the brand, the design system and the front-end, working with AI agents. This site is a record of that work, updated as it happens.

Now at LunarCrush

• A premium brand for LunarCrush: Turning a flat mark into a premium brand proposal: one material, a petrol color nobody in crypto owns, a human layer, a landing built as a media exercise, a live preview with an enterprise funds page, a written brand sys
• Free users, paid users, and the seam between them: A checkout that kept saying Free after a real payment, a snapshot chip that told the wrong time, and an upgrade reminder system designed from how free users actually behave.
• Hangar, Nov 2-9: teaching the agent SEO growth and AI citations: A competitor tool sparked a build: a nightly search trend agent, an SEO audit that finally files its own tickets, and a weekly benchmark of whether AI assistants name LunarCrush. Plus everything that broke on the way to
• A dashboard built around useful work: Turning two product conversations into a presentation, a revised onboarding audit, and an ordered plan for dashboard and recipes.

Latest updates

• Teaching search to wait before it says no: A LunarCrush search fix that turned one bad empty state into three explicit states: still looking, possible correction, and real no-match.
• Making LunarCrush feel faster: From Dan's feedback to production verification: tables, first loads, navigation, product decisions and the work still ahead.
• Hangar, Sep 21-22: can it recover its own stuck tickets?: Four tickets blocked after the relaunch, one provider with credit, six real sessions. What a bounded autonomy test found, fixed and still could not close.
• Hangar, week of Sep 4: what breaks and what changes: Two days of the host's own records: 119 deliveries, 342 worker exits for lack of a seat, reviews blocking half the time. Twelve failure classes, one diagnosis, five changes.
• Hangar: The platform behind every LunarCrush coding agent: one runtime, agents defined as data, pipelines as dependency graphs, and a patrol that repairs its own failures. In 17 days it merged 121 tickets to staging.
• NFL and Fantasy Football on LunarCrush: In three weeks LunarCrush went from a crypto-first product to one with a full NFL category and a Fantasy Football app: an ESPN and Sleeper pipeline into D1, one page per team and player, and a signal that compares sharp
• Rebuilding LunarCrush: The 2026 redesign in progress: how we are rebuilding the product around AI-first behavior, what the data told us before we started, and the working sessions with Jon Farjo, our CPO, that have been shaping every decision
• LunarCrush 2026 — Rebuilding Compare: Compare used to be a three-asset, 24-hour, price-first page in the old app. In the 2026 workspace it became something else: unlimited topics across any category, adaptive metrics, and the contextual layer around the comp

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