Dolgo AI
Dolgo is an AI platform built for the maritime industry to help preserve and transfer mission-critical expertise before it disappears with retiring workers. Designed specifically for shipyards, maritime engineers, and technical crews, the platform captures real-world operational knowledge and makes it accessible exactly when it’s needed most.
Project details
Deliverables
Web design
Framer built
Art direction
Lead generation flow
Year
2026
Context
Dolgo sells into shipyards and maritime organisations facing what the trade press calls a "cliff edge": veteran engineers and shipbuilders retiring faster than their knowledge can be transferred. The buyers are shipyard operations leaders — not the usual audience for an AI startup website.
My role
Sole designer and builder. The agency brought in the client; I owned design and Framer development end to end.
Art direction from near zero — typography, colour, layout system, and the full image set.
Built both conversion flows, not just the pages.
Copy was written by the founder and his collaborators. I owned the structure it sat in — what appears where, in what order, and how much of it a reader meets before being asked for anything.
The problem
A logo, some reference links, and nothing else. No brand guidelines, no photography, no design system, no marketing team — and the references came from several unrelated sites with no consistent direction between them.
The harder problem was positioning. Maritime is heavy, physical and conservative; Dolgo is an AI product. Lean too far into clean AI-startup aesthetics and you lose a shipyard operations director who has spent thirty years around welding bays. Lean too far into heavy industrial and you don't read as a technology company at all.
There was also no access to real photography. Shipyards aren't casually photographable and there was no budget for a shoot, so the brief specified AI-generated imagery, modified per section rather than left generic.
Constrains
Under four weeks, design to launch, tied to a fixed industry event date.
Solo founder client — no brand assets and no internal review. The brief was genuinely open, which meant the direction had to be argued for rather than matched to a spec.
AI-generated imagery only, as both source material and editing method.
Framer, built solo — so every design decision had to be one I could implement myself, fast.
Key decisions
1) The organising idea: old hands to new hands
Rather than designing "an AI website for maritime," I built everything around the company's actual thesis — knowledge passing from the generation that has it to the generation that doesn't, with AI as the mechanism rather than the subject. That's why the imagery leans on hands, crews and yards instead of dashboards and neural graphics.
2) Squared type, red on navy
A geometric, squared typeface rather than the rounded humanist sans most AI startups default to — maritime work is heavy and angular, and the letterforms needed to carry some of that. Navy as deep as the water, with red as the single accent. Navy alone is inert; every marine site is blue. Red is what industrial environments actually use for safety and alert, so it belongs in the setting — and because nobody in the sector uses it as a brand colour, it makes Dolgo read as a technology company.
3) Asymmetric layouts, restrained motion
Sections combine several images at different scales rather than sitting on a uniform grid — less monotonous over a long scroll, and considerably more forgiving of uneven AI-generated source material than betting a section on one large hero shot. Scroll animation is deliberately subtle: the audience is buying risk reduction for safety-critical work, and motion that performs reads as gloss.
4) Two lead flows, both segmented at the point of capture
For a solo founder, an undifferentiated list of emails is close to useless — there isn't time to work through it. So neither flow just collects addresses.
The first is a gated content flow. Our Capabilities splits into three market segments — Commercial, Defense, Asia-Pacific — and choosing one leads to a form, then a PDF download, with entries landing in a spreadsheet. Defense and commercial maritime are entirely different sales motions, so knowing which door someone came through is worth more than knowing their name.
The second is the main contact form, which asks two questions beyond the usual: primary challenge (retiring workforce, training at scale, attrition) and urgency (immediate, 3–6 months, just exploring).
Between them, the founder can see market, pain and buying intent before replying to anything. That was the highest-leverage work on the project, and it cost a handful of extra fields.
The work
Four pages plus the gated download flow. The home page runs a clear argument: the stakes stated plainly ("Your most valuable asset is about to retire"), three specific consequences an operations lead can recognise, a differentiation line ("built for maritime, not classrooms"), an interactive three-phase stepper showing how an engagement actually runs, then outcomes and the private beta invitation.
What We Solve goes deeper for a reader already convinced, ending in the segment picker that feeds the download flow.
The phase steppers were the most demanding components — sequenced, interactive explainers that had to collapse cleanly on mobile without losing their sense of order.
Outcome
The site launched at the Blue Innovation Symposium in Rhode Island as the landing surface for Dolgo's public launch.
That launch was covered by more than a dozen maritime trade publications, including Maritime Executive, MarineLink, Seatrade Maritime, Marine Log and The Digital Ship. Splash247 ran it as "'Spotify for skills' launched to stop shipyard brain drain."
To be precise about what that proves: the coverage was won by the product and the founder's campaign, not by the website. What the site did was absorb it — every article pointed readers at dolgo.ai, and the site had to convert an industry audience arriving cold. That's the job it was designed for, and why the segmented capture mattered more than the visual design did.
Dolgo now runs a private beta with shipyards and maritime organisations, with the site as its primary intake.
RomAltruista is a charity founded in 2011 with the mission to make is easy to partecipate to volunteer events in Rome, Italy.
case study