Gatekeep

Brand, product design, front-end build & pitch lead (team of 2)

2026. 4.5 hrs. Won second overall at the Entrepreneurs First hackathon.

Case-Study

github.com/owen-peters/GateKeep The Build in Action

The Gatekeep landing screen: the mark and promise in pop green on dark green.

Demo

Watch the Demo

Quick two-minute walk-through of the demo we gave at pitch time explained by me.

Walk-Through

Thesis

No one person can hold every account, tool, and token a company hands out, so things slip. Gatekeep is one place to see all of it, and an agent that opens and closes it for you.

Intent

The brief was to automate the dumbest job at your company and run it live, on an input we hadn't rehearsed. I picked this one because I'd lived it. Weeks after a job ended I still had the company card and the financial accounts, and I was the designer, so I shouldn't have had them in the first place.

Nobody was careless. Access just accumulates: a one-off favor for a coworker, a tool you need for a month, a login nobody wrote down. There's no single place to see it, so it slips. My teammate built the backend. I built the front end, the brand, and the story we told.

Insight

Access only ever gets tracked in one direction. Companies think hard about granting it and forget it exists after that.

So Gatekeep runs both ways. Tell Gary someone is a product designer and he provisions the exact tool suite that role should have. Tell him they're leaving and he finds every account, session, token, and card, closes them in order, then checks his own work until nothing is left open. One map, read forwards or backwards.

Decisions

Decision 1: Name it after the thing everyone is told not to do.

Gatekeeping is usually an accusation. Pointed at company systems it's just the job: one employee out, every access path closed. It gave us the tagline, access made exclusive, and the line I closed the pitch on: whether it's GitHub tokens, your design software, or your signature fragrance, always remember to Gatekeep.

Rejected: AccessIQ, RevokeHub, every name that makes a security tool sound like a filing cabinet.

Decision 2: Gary the Gatekeeper.

The agent does the whole job start to finish, so I gave it a name and a face instead of calling it an assistant. Gary is who you ask. He gets an entrance too, before you've seen a single screen of the app: his mark draws itself, opens an eye, then flies into the corner and becomes the logo. Four and a half seconds, the only dark screen in the product, and everyone in the room remembered him.

Rejected: a nameless AI panel behind a spinner.

Decision 3: One mark, three readings.

It's the G in Gatekeep, so the wordmark is the mark plus atekeep. Drop an eye in and it's Gary. Read it whole and it's a padlock with the shackle stopped short of the body, a lock sitting open. Open is the honest state to draw: it's what onboarding does on purpose and what offboarding leaves behind by accident.

Rejected: the closed padlock every security company already owns.

Decision 4: Verify, don't assume.

Revoking is one API call. Trusting that it worked is the part people can't do, so a run isn't finished until Gary reads everything back and counts zero active accounts, zero sessions, zero credentials. Then it prints a report you could hand to an auditor.

Rejected: calling it done because the API returned 200.

Decision 5: Design one system, not seven screens.

I built a small set of components on shared tokens and assembled every screen out of them. Nothing got drawn twice, changes landed everywhere at once while I was building the front end, and all eight screens came out looking like one product. It's the only reason two people ship this much in an afternoon.

Rejected: designing screens one at a time and running out of clock.

Craft

Mark ideation: circular concepts explored and cut, then the G that resolves into Gary and an open lock.

Meet Gary

The words write themselves, the mark draws itself and opens an eye, then a vector takes over at a measured point and flies into the header as the live logo.

Motion

Gary the Gatekeeper

I'm in the white jacket introducing our agent Gary through the site's custom loading animation

Team photo with the Entrepreneurs First judges after the result.

Second Place Finish

Team photo with our Entrepreneurs First judges.

Pitch Clips

Where I Went Wrong

The rule was that it runs live on an input we hadn't rehearsed. Gary's parser is regex and keyword scoring, and it only knows nine role phrases. Give it a title outside that list and it stops and asks instead of guessing, which is the safe failure, but it's still a stop.

I knew that while I was building and spent my hours on the brand and the interface anyway. I'd make the trade again, a demo nobody remembers doesn't place at all, but it's a fair reason we came second and not first.

Outcome

Second overall, two people, four and a half hours, real code the judges ran in front of us.

What stayed with me is bigger than firing someone. Every company leaks in the same place: seats nobody uses, tools nobody cancelled, permissions nobody meant to grant. A messy startup burns runway on it, and a large one just can't see it at all. Governing how access and information move through an organization doesn't only close security holes, it hands the money back, and that's the part that expands what a team can actually do.

The honest boundary: the platforms are modelled in our own schema rather than wired to live vendor APIs, so what we proved is the flow and the verification, not the integrations.