We almost rebranded the lab dark. We kept it cream.
Rebuild splitfirelabs.com in a bold dark theme, all its own
Kept UXArcade's cream — the boring choice was the brand choice
The first version of this site was near-black with a shocking-orange glow. It looked sharp. It also looked like a hundred other developer tools, and — more to the point — it looked like a different company than the cream, ink-bordered world UXArcade already lives in.
So we made a quieter call: the lab is a workbench, not a spotlight. Cream ground, ink borders, hard offset shadows — the exact DNA UXArcade uses, just desaturated so the products can be the loud ones. One hot colour, flame coral, is the lab’s alone.
Why this is the cheaper decision, not just the prettier one: a person who trusts UXArcade should feel at home the instant they land here. Continuity is free equity. And when product #2 ships, it inherits a design language that already reads as “same lab, new cartridge” — no re-teaching, no re-trusting.
The split you see everywhere — two panels divided by a seam with a spark in the gap — is the one thing we did invent. It’s the pedagogy made visible: feel it on the left, name it on the right. If a future surface doesn’t have a split, that’s a question we have to answer, not a default we get to skip.