IEEE Robots

The new design builds on the recently launched Spectrum brand, sharing its typography and color palette while giving ROBOTS its own identity. ABC Favorit serves as the primary typeface, paired with Ivar for article text. The interface appears in a dark theme by default (with light mode available), and each section features a unique accent color to support navigation and orientation.

With a dual audience of industry professionals and young students, the visual system strikes a balance between technical detail and playful engagement. Images are large and colorful. Hover states are animated and bubbly. Features including robot ratings, leaderboards, and games provide visitors a way to interact with and influence the site.

A key design challenge—and opportunity—was transforming the catalog’s deep well of structured data into an interface that feels intuitive, inviting, and full of possibility. We designed visual patterns that surface metadata throughout the site. Category tags appear directly on robot cards, providing context and guiding users toward broader groupings. From there, filters, search tools, and dynamic sorting options allow visitors to explore patterns across the catalog—like trends by country, use case, or capability. The interface facilitates both focused exploration and casual discovery, revealing the catalog not just as a collection of robots, but as a living dataset with stories to tell.

Groupings of robots are also highlighted on the homepage. A playful “easter egg” feature lets users shuffle through random collections with a click, keeping the experience fresh with every visit.

The ROBOTS site was built as a Remix app running on Cloudflare Workers, providing high performance and flexibility at the edge. This modern architecture supported both the algorithmic layout system and new, interactive data exploration features.

While the robot catalog had long served as a resource for learning about individual robots, we saw untapped potential in its aggregate data. What if users could explore broader trends—like which countries build the most humanoids, or how often AI appears in robot designs? To unlock this, we made the catalog’s structured data explorable through filtering and sorting tools.

We introduced a new taxonomy system of categories and features, allowing users to dynamically filter, sort, and combine data—revealing patterns and insights across the robotics landscape.