About
Earn your stripes.
Visual Explorer is a digital creative brand. We find exceptional design, study what makes it work, and build for the people who make it.
Most people know us for Archive, our platform for design inspiration: websites, apps, logos, graphics, editorial work and interface components, each one picked by a person and credited to its maker. But the Archive is one stripe of several. Behind it we do design research, build tools for creators and run an advertising platform of our own. Same eye, same standards, more than one line of work.
WHAT WE DO
Archive
A curated archive of exceptional digital design, chosen by people and credited by name. It is where we started, and where most people meet us.
WHAT WE STUDYResearch
We look hard at what gets made, what gets noticed and why. The Archive is our field notes, and what we learn shapes everything else we build.
WHAT WE BUILDTools
We make things for the people who make things: design resources and tools for creators, built to the same bar as the work we show.
HOW BRANDS JOIN INAdvertising
We run our own advertising platform. A few sponsors at a time, shown as work worth looking at and always labeled as sponsored.
WHAT WE STAND FOR
People choose the work
Editors look at every submission. No machine approves work or decides what the feed shows. If a piece is here, a person decided it belonged.
Makers come first
Work is credited by name and linked to whoever made it. Every project page is prepared for search with the maker in the title, so the credit travels with the work.
Quality over volume
The archive stays small on purpose. High-resolution media only, shown in full, with a clear reason behind every piece that gets in.
Rules you can read
How the feed is ranked, how stripes and badges are earned and how to have work removed are all written down in Docs. No hidden levers.
WHO’S BEHIND IT
Zac Nielson
Founder and CEOZac is a designer and entrepreneur based in Las Vegas, with around fifteen years in design, two companies founded in luxury automotive and time in corporate management at a Fortune 500 company. Visual Explorer is where those halves meet: a designer’s eye for what belongs here, and an operator’s discipline for running it.
Brand kit
For press, partners and anyone writing about Visual Explorer. Please use these as they are.
Name
Write Visual Explorer as two words, both capitalized. The username @visualexplr is only for X.
Logo
Use the full logo wherever there is room and the icon alone where there isn’t. The stripes in the name line up with the stripes in the icon, so never separate, restack or re-space the two. The icon always sits on its black tile. Keep clear space around the logo equal to half the icon’s width, and below 24 pixels tall use the icon on its own.
Stripes
Horizontal bars are the brand’s signature. They are how members back the work they rate, and they run through the loading states and icons. Keep them horizontal and evenly spaced.
Color
Black, white and a short run of grays. The work in the archive supplies the color, so the brand never competes with it.
Type
Inter, in weights 400 to 600. Headlines are set tight and large; body copy stays plain.
Voice
Plain and direct. Say what a thing does. American spelling. No hype.
Press and partnerships: message @visualexplr on X. How the archive works is covered in Docs.