Rebuilding the home for Google’s AI experiments
Google Labs
Google Labs is where some of the most ambitious AI ideas, like Google Gemini, take shape before they become products. Labs needed a site that felt just as in flux and alive. We partnered with their team to build an environment as dynamic as the experiments inside it. One that sparks curiosity, rewards play, and holds up as they keep changing. What made it possible is the interesting part.
Lab partners
Labs came in wanting something different, and gave us the room to build it.
A different kind of Google
Most brands want to look finished. Google Labs wanted the opposite. An AI workshop with the door open, where things are still being figured out. Unfinished, on purpose. Few clients would go there. Labs did, and trusted us to go with them. They gave us permission to explore, and asked us to build a site that did the same for everyone else.
An invitation to play
Labs tests its AI ideas in the open, and they only get better when people push on them. The old site had them on display, more like exhibits than experiments. But labs isn't a gallery — it's a playground. The objective was clear: get more people exploring more experiments.
Building the playground
The site had to look like nothing else in AI, and work like nothing else at Google.
Pushing the palette
The AI boom produced hundreds of new products, yet one interchangeable visual language: dark backgrounds, gradients, and interfaces that barely move. With Labs, we did the opposite. Rich colors. Fluid motion. Purposeful animation. And experiments that come alive on the page. All of it built to invite discovery and reward exploration.
Immersion by design
“Playful” is one of Labs’ brand principles, which meant the site had to be fun to use, not just nice to look at. So we rebuilt the architecture underneath it and designed everything to be responsive. Cards animate as you mouse over them, becoming something to interact with, not just something to read. Categories worked as doorways, not gatekeepers. Filtering and sorting stopped being utilities and started being part of the action.
“We trusted LFL to reimagine and evolve labs.google, bringing all the innovation of Google Labs to life in a way that honored where we’ve been on our journey. They nailed it!”
-Chad Lancaster, Director, Google Labs + AI Marketing
Life beyond the lab
The site stopped at experiments. The story didn't.
Lab notes
Some experiments graduate into products that go on to change the world, but the old site never mentioned it. Which meant a visitor could browse the whole thing without ever learning the tools they already use started right there. So we reworked the narrative to cover the whole arc, and built the module that tells it.
Graduation day
Project Tailwind became NotebookLM. Whisk and ImageFX became Google Flow. And Bard became Gemini. Millions of people use them every day, and each one started as an experiment in Labs. The next one starts the same way. We’re proud to have built the place it comes from.
Now let’s test your hypothesis
The site went live in May, and engagement time climbed more than a third in the seven weeks after. None of that would've happened if Labs played it safe. Strategy, design, and story only work this hard when someone lets them. The braver version of a project is almost always the better one. Bring us something worth testing.