- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Your name
Akash Mulye
Your creative role
Founder, and primary designer / developer at Hex Studio
Featured Website Link
Tell us a bit about yourself, your role, and how you found your way to a creative career
I am Akash Mulye, and I’m the founder of hexstudio.io, a creative development studio I’ve been running since 2020. I started freelancing in 2017, working across design, development, and experimental technology. Over the years I’ve worked with independent, small, medium and larger more well known businesses, on everything from websites and software platforms to custom activation tech, including things like interactive photo booths and digital installations.
My interest in technology started early, through analyzing video games and how they were designed. During high school and college I worked in retail and food service while spending most of my free time building side projects and teaching myself new tools. Eventually those projects began turning into real opportunities, which led me to take the risk of leaving my service jobs to focus on building hexstudio full-time.
Today my role blends creative work with entrepreneurship ~ designing, developing, consulting with clients, and mentoring younger creatives who are starting their own paths in the industry.
How did this project come about, how did you start working with this brand, was it just the website you created for them, how long did it take
This project came to us through one of the creative communities we collaborate with regularly. One of the owners of Chronic Ink, a Toronto-based tattoo studio, reached out to us about helping his girlfriend, Anna Li ~ a YouTuber in the women’s wellness space ~ build a website for her menstrual tea brand, Inner Code.
In addition to the website, we worked closely with the brand to develop packaging design, brand identity, and supporting media. The project began in September and wrapped up in January.
What was the main inspiration - visual or thematic - that guided you in the process of this website?
We wanted to balance ancient wisdom and modern wellness. Inner Code prompted us to look at how the product would affect people’s genetic code and we thought it would be fun to play with this relationship. Courier New was used as the secondary font and all informational text. It has a history of being used for coding and also scientific labelling and amino acid/DNA sequences. At the same time, we really needed to balance this with a more human feel. So the main typeface chosen was one that had a brushstroke like texture. This balance was the guideline throughout the entire design process.
Branding and web: Were you the one who created the brand design as well, or were there already branding assets to work with? What were the leading principles in implementing the brand experience within the digital design and web experience?
Inner Code being a menstrual tea company, it was important that the website / digital experience had that same warmth. Although we were pulling inspiration from design in science, we never wanted this to feel sterile. Informational, but highly personal.
Share any tech details, special tools or web-design features you included, or any behind-the-scenes information
The Inner Code website was built using Hydrogen, Shopify’s React-based framework, and hosted on Oxygen, Shopify’s platform for custom storefronts. The site is highly custom and media-rich, so optimizing performance and reducing friction for users was a priority. To achieve this, we implemented server-side rendering (SSR) using React Remix, ensuring fast load times and smooth interactions.
Hydrogen provided a lot of out-of-the-box tooling that was incredibly useful during development, allowing us to streamline complex functionality while keeping the code maintainable. Another key consideration was that Anna wanted almost complete control over her content. Using a headless commerce approach gave her the flexibility to manage products, pages, and media independently, while still delivering a seamless eCommerce experience.
Walk us through the design process of the product page
The product page was the most fun to do. We were given a list of what this page had to include. Then it really just boiled down to playing around and asking “how can we make each of these sections fit the theme while also trying to elevate the e-com experience?”
What are the main challenges specific to designing an E-comm website?
The main challenge in designing for E-com is making the experience not feel too “new”. There are certain psychological buying patterns now on digital platforms and if the experience is too forward then the product may fall behind in importance. Ultimately, we are trying to create an engaging, yet seamless experience for people to purchase the product that is being sold.
Thank you Akash!
