Product Design

Glimpse

Product design and frontend for Glimpse, a semantic search engine for Arweave that won a track at ao’s Agents of the Permaweb hackathon.

Client
Aditya Berry
Year
2025
Role
Product Designer, Frontend
Services
Product Design, Design System, Frontend Development, Landing Page, Visual Direction

Glimpse is a semantic search engine for Arweave. You type what you mean, and it finds text, images, video and audio stored on the permaweb by meaning instead of keywords. It won the AI-Enhanced Applications track at ao’s Agents of the Permaweb hackathon.

Aditya Berry built the search and wanted a retro interface for it. I designed the product in Figma, from the landing page to every results page, and built the frontend in React, TypeScript and Tailwind on the retro kit of Ardacity UI, my component library for Arweave.

Glimpse landing page: “Search almost anything with vector searching accuracy” over a receding grid, a search bar with Text, Image, Video and Audio filters, and sticker art of a penguin in shades and a green elephant in 3D glasses

The brief

Google, for the permaweb

Arweave stores data forever, but finding anything on it meant knowing where to look. Glimpse indexes it by meaning. Aditya had the search working and needed an interface with a personality: something retro, playful and quick to read, built in time for the hackathon.

Video: Glimpse screens drift past at an angle: the landing page, the orange video panel and the results pages

The system

Borrowed from Ardacity

The look comes from Ardacity UI, the component library I made for Arweave apps, whose retro kit this is: 2px ink borders, hard offset shadows, mono type, and buttons that press into their own shadow. Stickers and a receding grid gave it the arcade feel.

The Glimpse results page, rebuilt: “Arlink” types itself into the search bar, and eight result cards land in a grid, each with a title, an arweave.net address and a Details button

  • Arlink, https://linkweave.arweave.net
  • Arlink - Deployments on Arweave made as simple as one “click”, https://arlink.arweave.net
  • HOVEROPE X ARLINK, https://flyingdutchman.arweave.net
  • AOLink, https://aolink.arweave.net
  • ArBlog, https://0xtukimin.arweave.net
  • connect, https://connect.arweave.net
  • Search, coming soon...., https://search.arweave.net
  • website.arweave.net, https://website.arweave.net
The results page, rebuilt with what the shipped build found for “Arlink”
A retro result card titled “Cool Shades” with a transaction ID and an open button, over the elephant artwork
An image result card

Search almost anything.

$2,500
Track prize, AI-Enhanced Applications
8,291
Views on the launch post
4
Kinds of media searched

On the win

Glimpse is an agent of indexing and understanding, autonomously processing the vast, unstructured data on Arweave and transforming it into a searchable, content-aware knowledge base.

ao, Agents of the Permaweb, winners

The Google for arweave that actually understand the data permaweb

Aditya Berry, Glimpse, at launch

On X, September 2025

Video: The shipped build: searching Arlink and Ardrive returns cards of permaweb sites, and a result opens into its details with a Visit Website button

The shipped build

Another direction

The road not taken

Alongside the retro kit I designed a quieter direction: frosted glass over a mountain range, in dark and light. The retro one shipped.

The glass direction, dark: a frosted search bar and filter pills over a snowy mountain range, a huge faded GLIMPSE behind
The glass direction, light: the same frosted search over a pale, misty mountain range
Glimpse screens laid out at an angle: the landing page, the text results list and the image results grid
Landing, text results and image results
A bento of Glimpse pieces: the landing page, the wordmark with “Semantic based search engine for Arweave”, a result card, the results page and the orange video panel