So, in the laboratory slash studio slash dungeon slash robot-dragon lair, I have constructed three tools most wondrous.
They are themselves amalgamations and collections of various other tools, so really, this is toolception.
We injected everything we know into them. Now we are watching as they pretend to be us without possessing quite the same taste, and I am standing over them shouting:
IT’S ALIIIIIVE!
I speak, of course, of Chroma, Cadence, and Lost Audio Engine.
Connected palettes, living gradients, accessible relationships, motion, patterns, textures, previews, and production-ready exports.
Open Chroma ↗ 02 / Typographic life-form CadenceChoose fonts, give them jobs, tune the system, test real compositions at real screen sizes, and take the results with you.
Open Cadence ↗ 03 / Audio abomination LostSend clean recordings through physical media, communication devices, strange spaces, damage, obstruction, and failure.
Open Lost ↗Chroma is what happens when you stop treating a palette like five attractive hex codes sitting politely beside one another.
It lets you see what colors actually do once they have jobs, context, motion, hierarchy, and consequences.
Could you do all of this yourself?
Yes.
Would you?
Would you really?
Cadence does roughly the same thing with type. Choose fonts. Give them jobs. Tune the sizes, spacing, weight, rhythm, motion, and hierarchy. Then test the resulting system inside actual compositions before releasing it into an unsuspecting website.
Technically, you could assemble a type system manually.
You could also continue nudging the same heading two pixels at a time until the sun consumes the Earth.
Cadence offers another path.
Lost Audio Engine is for clean audio that needs to sound like it has lived a little.
Or suffered.
Or traveled through a telephone, damaged tape, unreliable codec, hostile room, broken speaker, ancient machine, suspicious transmission system, or object somebody found beneath a motel bed.
Instead of one generic “lo-fi” button, Lost gives you a modular signal rack filled with physical media, communication devices, spaces, damage, obstruction, and failure.
Because sometimes the recording should not merely sound worse.
It should sound like it came from somewhere.
These things perform tasks people could absolutely do on their own.
BUT BADLY.
So I decided to remove some of the guesswork using concepts we in the bizness call:
EXPERIENCE.
KNOWLEDGE.
A ROBUST AMOUNT OF DESIGN.
The tools do not replace taste. They make taste easier to exercise by handling repetitive calculations, organizing moving parts, exposing relationships, and showing you what your decisions are actually doing.
They contain our opinions about how color, typography, sound, motion, systems, and people work together.
They are useful.
They are strange.
They are pretty cool.
And I hope they give y’all a reason to stick around the front of my world-domination business—
I MEAN
—my web-experience design studio’s home world.
We need snacks for our Chief Executive Corgi, and while I do everything around here, my performance review with Pollo is coming up today.
Unless I bribe him, there is no way I am getting out of that meeting without at least one judgmental corgi stare.
Anyway. That’s it.