Cone Six: Studio OS for Ceramics
A complete product, designed and built end to end: the brand, a marketing site, a brand book, the studio app and a white-labelled customer website. Community clay studios run on clipboards and a whiteboard on the kiln room door. Cone Six replaces them with one calm system built around the thing potters actually care about: the piece.
- Role
- Brand, product design & development
- Scope
- Identity, marketing site, web app, dashboard, white-label site
- Stack
- React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind v4, Motion, dnd-kit, Zustand
- Type
- Bricolage Grotesque, Newsreader, Geist
Live The real product, running here. Open the live demo to explore the studio app, try the kiln planner, or visit the brand book and the customer site. Studios, people and data are fictional demo content.
The problem
Generic tools don't speak potter.
Small community clay studios run on clipboards, spreadsheets and a whiteboard on the kiln room door. Bookings aren't the hard part; generic tools handle those. What's missing is everything specific to ceramics.
A pot takes two to four weeks and passes through five states and two firings, so members constantly ask “where's my mug?” Loading a kiln is a spatial puzzle with hard rules. Firing fees are worked out by hand, and the glaze recipes live in a binder nobody can find.
The idea
- A studio OS that speaks potter
- The core object is the piece, not the booking
- Every piece gets a passport
- Kiln loading as a guided puzzle
- Fees calculated automatically
- One brand, many studio sites
The brand
Made of clay & heat.
- 01
The name
Cone 6 is the most common mid-fire temperature: every potter knows it, nobody else does.
- 02
The mark
A pyrometric cone at the moment it slumps, which is how potters know a firing is done.
- 03
Construction
One cubic curve on a 48-unit grid, generated in code from a single bend parameter.
- 04
Logo suite
Fire gradient, reversed, ink and app icon, crisp from 16px up.
Because the mark is generated, not drawn, the same geometry powers the favicon, the app icon, the loader animation and the scroll-driven hero, and it can never go off-model.
Color
Clay neutrals, fire for meaning
Typography
Hand-cut warmth, kiln-controller precision
Wedge, throw, fire.
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
The kiln is warm.
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
Your ramen bowl is out of the kiln.
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
2232°F · 8.4H · C6-1052
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
In the world: business cards, a stamp for studio-made pieces, the notification everyone loves to get, and the kiln room door sign.
System design
Every piece has a passport.
The pottery passport tracks each piece through five stages with a timestamped journey. Every pot is drawn procedurally from its form, clay body, stage and glaze: greenware looks damp, bisque looks chalky, and glazed work gets a drip line that stops above the bare foot, just like the real thing.
Firings use real schedules (slow bisque to cone 04, medium glaze to cone 6) modelled as ramp and hold segments with natural cooling, so live temperature, phase and ETA are all derived from the start time. Bookings are capacity-aware: when someone cancels, the seat goes to the first person on the waitlist.
Under the hood
- Procedural pottery renderer
- Firing engine with real schedules
- Drag-and-drop kiln planner
- Capacity-aware bookings & waitlists
- One store, swappable for a real backend
- Code-split, ~140 kB main bundle
The studio app
One calm place to run the studio.
- 01
Dashboard
Revenue, queue, seats and members, with a live firing curve front and centre.
- 02
Pieces
Every pot in the studio, filtered by stage, each drawn from its own data.
- 03
Kiln planner
Drag pieces onto the shelf or auto-load; too-tall pieces and kiln posts are respected.
- 04
Kilns & firings
Live temperature, ETA and what's waiting for each kind of firing.
- 05
Classes
The week at a glance, with seats, instructors and waitlists.
- 06
Glaze library
Studio glazes with finish, colour range and test tiles, finally out of the binder.
Kiln time runs 60× faster in the demo, so the Big Bertha firing finishes within minutes. Unload it, and the pieces move to Finished and members are notified.
Members: plan, shelf, work in progress and balance in one row, so the front desk can answer any question in seconds.
The marketing site: the pottery passport, why a cone, the kiln planner, a studio owner's story and pricing “like a bag of clay, not a kiln.”
White-label
One system, many studios.
Mudroom Ceramics is a fictional studio running on Cone Six. Its website uses a completely different brand (olive, oat, terracotta and Instrument Serif) on top of the same data layer, so a class booked on Mudroom's site appears on the roster and in the activity feed inside the app.
Mudroom's own site: “Get your hands dirty.” Same bookings engine, a brand that's entirely theirs.
Responsive down to 375px; in the app the side navigation becomes a drawer. The chart palette was checked for colour-vision deficiencies, and colour is never the only cue.
