Notes from the studio

Writing

We make a small number of apps with a lot of care. Occasionally we write down what we learned doing it — about design, craft, and the parts of software you'd never notice.

  1. Design is the specification

    May 22, 2026 · 6 min Most teams treat design as something you apply to software. We treat it as the thing the software is built to obey — and that inversion is why the details hold.
  2. The anti-slop field guide

    May 30, 2026 · 8 min A concrete catalog of the tells that make software look machine-made — gradients, glassmorphism, Inter-everywhere, icons-in-circles — and the specific fix for each.
  3. How this site is built

    Jun 5, 2026 · 7 min ~150 KB, zero third-party requests, self-hosted variable fonts, a hand-drawn canvas field, and no framework. A build note on treating constraints as craft.