A year of warm websites
After twelve months of cream backgrounds and terracotta accents, here's what we've learned about designing with warm palettes at scale.
A year ago we made a small, loud decision: no more pure white backgrounds, no more pure black backgrounds, and no more 'SaaS indigo.' We would design exclusively in warm color for twelve months and see what broke.
What broke was mostly our assumptions. Contrast thresholds, shadow colors, the way we used blue, the way we treated links — everything needed re-examining.
Start with the paper
We stopped thinking of the background as 'white' and started thinking of it as 'paper.' That single mental shift changed everything downstream: how we chose shadows, how we layered cards, how warm our grays needed to be to avoid looking greenish on a cream surface.
More from the journal.
Why curated still beats generated
The case against the infinite scroll of AI-generated assets — and why a human editor is the most underrated tool in a marketplace.
Shipping a site in an afternoon
A walk-through of how we use our own packs to take a new project from empty repo to deployed in half a day.
On owning your assets
Subscriptions expire. Licenses don't have to. Our case for lifetime, transferable asset licenses in an era of perpetual rent.