Work

Kumo is Japanese for cloud, and the site takes its pace from a tea room. Headlines are set in Shippori Mincho, labels run vertically down the margins, and a red seal sits where most sites would put a logo.

The homepage follows the old calendar of twenty-four small seasons. In mid-October that's Cold Dew, and the copy talks about nagori, the month of remnants. Dark mode is the same room after sundown, with cream ink on near-black.

Dead wax is the blank ring of vinyl between the last groove and the label, where pressing plants scratch in their catalog numbers. Only diggers ever notice it, and we liked that. So the hero is a record with its own run-out etching circling the label.

The rest comes from the shop floor. Archivo, wide and heavy, does the shouting. IBM Plex Mono handles the catalog numbers and captions, and the genre sections wear the same cardboard tabs you flip through on a Saturday afternoon.

Dark mode turns the paper into a black sleeve, and the red gets even louder.

Odds are someone will pull this site up in a parking lot at midnight. Astronomers use red light after dark to keep their eyes adjusted, and that became the dark theme. The whole site turns red and amber and the photos dim a little. Even the buttons fade to a faint tint so nothing glares.

In daylight, it's a printed star atlas on cream paper, with a sky chart in the hero and a thin headline that turns italic halfway through. The coordinates, sunset times, and sky readings are set in DM Mono, like an observing log.

Vesper House is named for evening, the hour when the dunes go copper and the water goes dark. The whole site is built around that light.

The hero glows like late sun, then like embers once you switch to dark mode. Fraunces sets the headlines with a little softness, Figtree keeps the rest quiet, and every photo leans toward the same burnt orange.

A volunteer bike co-op doesn't want a slick website. It wants a zine. So this one is printed in risograph pink, blue, and yellow, with misregistered ink on the headlines, masking tape on the photos, and notes scribbled in the margins.

The print effects happen in the browser. Volunteers upload ordinary photos and the site turns them into halftone duotones, so nobody has to open Photoshop.

Light mode is newsprint and dark mode is black paper. The ink works on both.

The Marlowe is a movie palace from 1929 that still shows silent films with a live organist, so the homepage opens the way the building does. You walk in under a marquee with real letter tiles and a ring of bulbs, framed by red velvet curtains.

In light mode it's the printed program: cream paper, emerald ink, and gold. Switch to dark and the house lights go down.

The type borrows from the same era, with Limelight on the wordmark, Poiret One for the long, thin headlines, and condensed mono letter tiles on the marquee. The Wurlitzer even gets its own rank of gold organ pipes.

Most sites are designed light and adapted for dark. We did Stillwater the other way around. It's a six-room lodge at the end of a gravel road, and the good parts happen at night.

The palette comes from cedar, sword fern, and creek water. Fraunces and Karla keep the type unfussy, and the small things are made of paper and wood: weekend dates hung on key tags, notes on slips, a guest book you can actually read.

Light mode is the same forest on an overcast morning.

Most pets dread the vet, and plenty of their humans do too. So we made this one soft, with rounded Fredoka letters, pastel sections with wavy edges, and sticker badges. A hand-drawn underline sits beneath the word “dread” in the headline. It probably does more for a nervous owner than a paragraph of reassurance.

Dark mode trades the cream for deep plum and forest green, and the sticker badges keep their pastels. The prices are right there on the homepage, too. That's more of a policy than a design choice, but it might be the friendliest thing on the page.

Everything about Mira Cay is water, so the photos do most of the talking. Fraunces sets the headlines and room names, Manrope handles everything else, and the teal accents come straight from the lagoon.

Light mode is pale, like sand at noon. Dark mode is the lagoon after sunset, nearly black with a hint of teal. A paper luggage tag on one of the inner pages keeps its colors either way.

Trail races are loud, muddy, and a little unhinged, and the site needed to feel like the start line at six in the morning. Barlow Condensed in heavy italics, lime and orange straight off a race bib, topographic lines behind the hero, and a clock counting down to the first gun.

The header, hero, and elevation profiles stay dark in both schemes. That's where the adrenaline is. Everything else switches, and in light mode the lime deepens to olive so you can actually read it.

A landscape studio's best work is outside, so the site mostly gets out of the way. Big photographs, wide margins, and a single italic word in the headline: remember.

Light mode is a cool gray, like the Columbia River Gorge before the fog burns off. Dark mode goes warm instead, a soft black with a little earth in it.

Surreal CMS is our own product, and it's been running since 2008. We wanted the redesign to feel like the app: calm, and always clear about what to do next. Every page has one bright button, and nothing else gets to compete with it.

The colors come from the product. The blue is the same one the app is built on, the neutrals lean navy instead of gray, and the logo's orange only shows up where something needs pointing at. Light mode has a soft periwinkle wash. On deep navy in dark mode, the button gets a little brighter so it still wins.

Look closely at the editor in the hero. That's Kumo, the tea house at the top of this page.