# Designing and building the Vercel Ship conference platform

By Steven Van · 2025-06-11

Vercel's design team explains how ferrofluid visuals, v0 prototyping, and a Next.js/Postgres/Payload stack built Ship 2025's site.

For **Vercel Ship 2025**, the [Vercel](<https://creatorstoolbox.com/tools/vercel>) design team built the conference site's visual identity around ferrofluid, the black magnetic liquid developed by NASA, aiming for something that felt fluid and fast. The team detailed the process in a [blog post](<https://vercel.com/blog/designing-and-building-the-vercel-ship-conference-platform>).

- Early ferrofluid visuals triggered trypophobia in internal reviews, so the team pulled back from spiky, clustered shapes toward a softer, near-metallic liquid look, generating over 15,000 images and videos with Flux, Google Veo 2, Runway and Ideogram along the way.

- The site's fluid surfaces were built with a ray-marching rendering technique to avoid visible polygons, including a glass prism effect and simulated ferrofluid displacement, with public demos of each exploration stage.

- v0 was used to prototype the registration, schedule and gallery interactions directly from Figma designs, so Design Engineering could start from working components instead of static mockups.

- The site itself moved to a Next.js app backed by a Postgres database and Payload as the CMS, replacing a prior setup that layered Redis on top of separate content and registrant data stores.

- The team used Incremental Static Regeneration for CMS-driven pages, Partial Prerendering to keep the homepage mostly static while CTAs and login states stay dynamic, and the use cache directive with cacheLife to set different cache freshness for things like ticket availability versus lower-churn content.

[![](<https://assets.vercel.com/image/upload/contentful/image/e5382hct74si/1kDlySVaCAhdKpP0gRPj5l/681fc9122e4e16a2d2eb84ba08d95829/Designing_and_building_the_Vercel_Ship_conference_platform.png>)](<https://vercel.com/blog/designing-and-building-the-vercel-ship-conference-platform>)

![Vercel](<https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=vercel.com&sz=128>)

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[Original source](<https://vercel.com/blog/designing-and-building-the-vercel-ship-conference-platform>)

[Read Designing and building the Vercel Ship conference platform on Creators Toolbox](<https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/vercel-designing-and-building-the-vercel-ship-conference-platform>)

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Canonical source: https://creatorstoolbox.com/blog/vercel-designing-and-building-the-vercel-ship-conference-platform