A pottery studio platform designed around how potters actually work — visual-first, colour-literal, and built for wet hands on a phone screen.
Studio potters test glazes constantly — different clay bodies, different layering combinations, different cones — and the results usually live scattered across camera rolls and paper notebooks. There’s no easy way to look back and ask “what did I put on this one?” or to see what a studio-mate tried that came out well. Kiln is a place to log a piece the moment it comes out of the kiln, and to browse what everyone else in the studio (or beyond it) has tried.
The instinct with a “tracking” product is to design a form and a table. Glaze results don’t work that way — the whole point is the colour, and a name on its own tells you nothing. “SC-16” means nothing to a potter; the actual glaze does.
So colour became a first-class piece of information rather than metadata: every glaze and clay body carries a colour swatch, shown as a small dot wherever its name appears — on cards, in the detail view, inside the picker itself. That last part forced a real interaction decision, since a native <select> element can’t render a swatch next to an option. The pickers became a custom component with typed search and free-text entry, so the extra design effort bought back the one thing that actually mattered to the people using it.
The same logic shaped the entry cards. At rest, a card is just the photo — no title, no tags, nothing between the viewer and the piece. Hovering (or tapping, on mobile) reveals the glaze layers and clay body over a frosted-glass overlay. Browsing the Explore gallery should feel like flipping through a lookbook, not scanning a spreadsheet — the metadata is there when you want it, invisible when you don’t.
A shared studio tool needs real permission boundaries, but the three tiers here — Super Admin, Studio Admin, Member — aren’t an arbitrary access-control exercise. They map onto how a ceramics studio already works: someone owns the studio’s official glaze and clay list, individual members own their own entries, and a studio can choose whether its members’ work is visible to the public Explore gallery at all. The permission model exists to make a shared materials list possible without one member accidentally deleting another’s history.
Inside that, the day-to-day flows were designed to stay forgiving rather than strict. Adding a batch of new pieces is a two-step wizard — photos first, details after — and if someone runs out of time or information partway through, incomplete items save quietly as private drafts instead of blocking the whole batch. The goal was to match how someone actually works after a firing: rushed, with wet hands, filling in details for six pieces at once, some of which they’ll finish labeling later.
A ceramics studio is not a desk. Most of this gets used standing at a table with clay-dusty or wet hands, phone propped against something. That pushed mobile from “responsive pass” to its own design problem: a bottom tab bar instead of a sidebar, the add-entry wizard opening full-screen instead of as a dialog, swipe gestures to browse a piece’s photos, and a save button that’s always reachable without hunting for a hover state that doesn’t exist on a touchscreen.
The interface deliberately stays out of the way: a warm neutral, border-first palette (no card shadows — separation comes from a hairline border) so nothing competes with the ceramic photography itself. Colour is reserved entirely for the glazes and clays being documented; the UI itself is close to monochrome. Type pairs a clean sans (Inter) for interface text with a serif (Averia Serif Libre) for titles and display moments — a small nod to craft and handmade material in an otherwise utilitarian tool.
Studio Admins can currently grant admin access to a member, but there’s no UI yet to see who holds it or revoke it — a real gap once a studio has been running for a while and roles need to change. There’s also an open question around the canvas-rendered swatch-only cards (entries with no photo yet) and whether their contrast holds up against the same hover overlay used everywhere else.
Newest first.
Added Super Admin, Studio Admin, and Member tiers so a studio’s shared materials list and its members’ individual work can coexist safely. Known gap: no UI yet to see or revoke an admin grant once it’s made.
Replaced a 19-item placeholder glaze list with 610 real entries across four brands, added a ~100-body clay catalog sourced from real suppliers, and gave every material a colour swatch — parsed from its name where possible, manually overridden when the name gave no hint (looking at you, “Dragon’s Eye”).
Rebuilt as its own experience rather than a breakpoint squeeze — bottom tab bar, full-screen modals and wizard, swipe carousels — plus a battery of iOS Safari fixes for a dynamic toolbar that kept resetting scroll position mid-browse.
Moved to the current warm neutral, border-first palette and the Inter/Averia Serif Libre pairing, with colour deliberately reserved for the ceramics themselves rather than the interface.