A little design,
a dash of chaos.
A spectrum-bright identity for an independent studio doing brand, web, print, social & SEO for small businesses across East Texas — opinionated, warm, and wired for motion. Synced to the live site at design-chaos.com.
One wordmark, five cuts.
Hand-lettered script with a spectrum swash underneath. White letters live on the ink canvas, black letters go on paper and imagery. The stacked cut is for square spaces, the circle badge for stickers and stamps, and the D-C monogram for anything smaller than a business card.
White on ink, stacked.
The hero version. On the homepage it sits at the centre of the orbiting constellation nav; everywhere else the horizontal cut takes over. Leave it room to breathe.
Below these sizes the script loses its character. Drop the tagline first (the notag cut), then switch to the D-C monogram. The site serves the monogram on ink as its favicon and app icon (icon-512.png).
A spectrum, sampled from the mark.
Six colors pulled directly from the logo gradient — the exact values the live theme ships (theme.json). Ink black is the canvas; paper is the secondary surface. Use one accent at a time per layout — the spectrum is for the gradient.
One gradient. Use it sparingly.
Reserved for the moments that matter — italic words, the wordmark itself, primary CTAs, and accent stripes. Never as a full background; the spectrum is louder than it looks.
Editorial bones, conversational warmth.
A serif with an italic that earns its keep, a clean humanist sans for everything you read, a handwritten face for the human aside, and a mono for the labels that organize the page. All four are self-hosted variable fonts on the live site — no Google Fonts CDN. Italics are a feature; set them in the gradient when you mean it.
Aa Bb
Built for small business owners who refuse to be invisible.
Four crafts. One studio.
Designing since 2003
A homepage shouldn't feel like a brochure. It should feel like the moment a customer walks in and immediately knows they're in the right place — confident, well-lit, and clearly run by someone who gives a damn.
a little design, and a dash of chaos
§ Designed in Tyler, TX — built for East Texas
A studio that breathes.
Three signatures carry the brand on the live site — an orbiting constellation nav, a pointer-reactive smoke canvas, and a rotating headline word — over a base layer of the hue-cycling gradient and gentle scroll-reveals. All slow, all eased, all optional: motion decorates, never blocks reading, and respects reduced-motion and no-JS.
The nav orbits.
The homepage navigation is a constellation — labeled nodes orbiting the mark. Real <a> links underneath; the orbit is progressive enhancement.
Chaos you can stir.
A pointer-reactive haze drifts behind the hero in brand colors, reacting to the cursor. Gated off on mobile for performance.
One word, always changing.
The hero keeps one rotating word — Web / Print / Graphic / Social / Content / SEO — swapped on a timer, so the crawlable H1 stays a single clean sentence.
Plain-spoken, opinionated, kind.
Write like you're sitting across from a small business owner with a coffee and ten minutes. Confident, never corporate. Specific, never vague. Funny when it's true, never when it's filler.
We say · We don't say
House style
Show, then tell.
Lead with the work, not the pitch. The case study is the headline; the words are the caption.
Specific over clever.
"Custom design — no templates" beats "we build beautiful websites." Names, numbers, places.
One italic per thought.
The gradient italic is for the moment that matters in a sentence. Two italics fight each other.
Warm, not cute.
Use contractions. Say "you" and mean it. Save jokes for when they're load-bearing — never as decoration.