Case study 01 · Concept project · Fictional brand, no client
Kilnfold
A storefront for a two-person stoneware studio that sells every kiln load in an afternoon, and until now sold it all through Instagram DMs.
The brief
What the studio needed, in one breath.
Kilnfold fires forty pieces at a time. Each firing sells out in hours, mostly to whoever messages first, and everyone else finds out from a “sold” comment. The site has to make a sell-out feel fair, and make the wait for the next kiln part of the product.
Sales run through DMs. No stock count, no queue, and a lot of “is this still available?”
Two potters, no developer. Every page has to update from one sheet of firing data.
Sell by firing, not by category: one dated drop, a visible count, and a waitlist that rolls into the next kiln.
Research & moodboard
Two weeks of looking before any pixels. What we kept, and why.
- P1
Sell by firing. A dated batch is the unit of everything: the URL, the email, the count.
- P2
Count, don’t hype. Numbers replace urgency copy. “3 of 40 left” says enough.
- P3
One surface, one shadow. Photos share a slab and a light, so forty pieces read as one family.
Identity
A logotype, three colours and two typefaces. Nothing else.
The o is a bowl. A half-disc on the baseline, a rim line at the x-height, one glaze band. It works alone as the stamp on the foot of every piece.
Sampled from unglazed bisque. Every background.
RGB 238,230,217An iron-oxide wash. Text and lines; never pure black.
RGB 51,37,30The cone 10 flame. One action per screen, no more.
RGB 169,73,31Contrast: Iron on Bisque 11.9 : 1 (AAA) · Kiln on Bisque 4.6 : 1 (AA) · Bisque on Kiln for buttons 4.6 : 1 (AA)
Aa
Forty pieces. One kiln. No restocks.
Aa
Cone 10 stoneware, thrown and trimmed by hand in small batches of forty.
- Display 96/0.95Firing 07
- H2 48/1.05Opens Saturday
- Body 18/1.5Held for you for ten minutes.
- Label 12/1.2 caps3 OF 40 LEFT
Design system
Live components, not pictures of them. Hover, tab and press them.
12of 40 left
Wide bowlAsh glaze · 18 cm
4 of 6 left- 4
- 8
- 12
- 16
- 24
- 40
- 64
Key screens
Built as real HTML, then framed. Scroll and the page inside the browser scrolls with you.
Motion
The signature interaction: the countdown is the kiln. Drag it.
20°C
Greenware
- 20 °C
Greenware - 950 °C
Bisque - 1280 °C
Glaze, cone 10
On the live site this is the drop announcement: as the firing date gets closer the photo moves from wet clay to bisque to finished glaze, and the number is the kiln, not a sales timer.
Concept: what we would measure
Kilnfold is not real and nothing launched, so there are no results on this page.
These are the numbers we would agree with the studio before launch, each tied to a design decision made to move it. Targets, not outcomes.
Next project
EmberA coffee roaster, concept 03 in the Lab