Ouzel

Identity and site, 2026

Ouzel runs as a DBA of TEC, and I designed the whole of it, the name, the logo, the type, thirteen rendered objects, an orbital map of the market and an authored scene at the foot of the page.

I pushed scholastic utopianism as far as it would go, because the agent space looks the same everywhere and a company nobody has heard of still has to look credible.

References

The mood board explains everything under it: the dipper, astrolabes and orreries, a cabinet of curiosities, a card catalog and an engraved plate. They share a nineteenth century confidence that the world can be cataloged, and the site borrows it wholesale.

A mood board of reference plates, a dipper, astrolabes and orreries, a cabinet of curiosities, a card catalog and an engraved plate — The mood board, every plate printed with its own source

The name

The name had to land with partners at major law firms, so I ran thousands of candidates myself. Ouzel won because John Muir wrote an essay on the water ouzel, so the identity had a bird and a piece of writing behind it before anything was drawn.

The brief

The words were settled before the design began, so every decision left happened inside what a visitor sees. The first build came back unclear and boring, and what I asked for next went the other way, heavy animation everywhere and an ouzel in water.

The first hero, the headline over a shader sun on hot cream — The first hero, the one thing kept out of the first build

A rejected flat two by two quadrant diagram of the market — The first hero, the one thing kept out of the first build

Scholastic utopianism

Scholastic utopianism sets knowledge out as treasure, the way DK Eyewitness lays out a page and the Nature Company dressed a store. TEC runs on the Nature Company half of it, so for Ouzel I dug into the DK Eyewitness half, heavy skeuomorphism and the maximalism of the early internet while it still believed in itself.

What I was reading

I spent part of this summer in San Francisco and Sonoma, reading Jack London and John Muir for a Mixmag feature I am writing on San Francisco. Muir's line about the hummingbird of blooming waters sits under the scene at the foot of the page, the only sentence added to the build.

Three channels

Objects modeled in Blender in the spirit of Myst drive one channel, geometry that nods at Northwest Coast formline the second, and color off 1960s psychedelic album art the third. With three channels moving at once the logo had to stay blank and stable.

Decisions

A flat two by two market map read as unclear and unimpressive and came back as an orbital diagram. Seven agent cards read as lazy and became a catalog of plates, and the static band at the foot became a scene where the bird dives, takes a fish and climbs into night.

The market map redrawn as an orbital diagram, bodies revolving on engraved guide rings — The market map rebuilt as an orbital diagram

A rejected grid of seven agent cards with ghost numerals behind them — The market map rebuilt as an orbital diagram

The agents laid out as a catalog of plates, an index rail beside one large featured plate — The catalog of plates that replaced them, every name and description visible at once

The banner scene at the moment the bird takes a fish, the sky ramping to night — The catalog of plates that replaced them, every name and description visible at once

The banner scene run from start to finish, the bird diving, taking the fish and climbing into night — The banner scene running, authored SVG driven by scroll position

The logo and the artwork

The illustrated roundel stood as the identity until late August, when a pixel version of the bird turned up on a poster and I made it the logo, encoded pixel for pixel at fifty by twenty nine off the source. Every placement lands on a whole multiple of that box, and the loader's breathing moved from a scale pulse to an opacity pulse because a fractional scale breaks square pixels.

The logo, the pixel ouzel

The source it was encoded from, fifty by twenty nine pixels

The illustrated ouzel roundel, a dipper in formline inspired geometry — The ouzel artwork, demoted from the identity and kept for the enquiry panel

The ouzel roundel at three sizes, down to its legibility floor — The ouzel artwork, demoted from the identity and kept for the enquiry panel

The site

One page at tec.ltd/ouzel runs a hero on a shader, the orbital map, the catalog of plates, an animated process chain and the banner scene. Floating slabs sit over a three dimensional world, each one a plate on graph paper with a dateline in small caps, six of them numbered I to VI.

The Ouzel hero, the headline over a shader sun on hot cream — The hero, locked after the first build

The catalog of agent plates, each with its own rendered brass object — The hero, locked after the first build

The animated process chain, numbered stages on earth toned rails — The process chain, numbered stages on the earth toned rails

Type

Ivar Display Condensed sets the display voice and Ivar Script the accent, with Cheltenham Old Style Pro, Sorts Mill Goudy and Libre Baskerville brought over from TEC so the two sites read as one studio.

Ivar Display Condensed, Ivar Script, Cheltenham Old Style Pro, Sorts Mill Goudy and Libre Baskerville at the sizes the site sets them — The type system at the sizes the site sets it

Renders

I modeled and rendered thirteen objects headless in Blender, in antique brass and ink lacquer, and kept the generation script for every one. Each plate shows the object that depicts the work it describes, one to one, on one warm rig shared by all of them.

Filing bundle — Thirteen objects modeled and rendered in Blender, antique brass and ink lacquer

Transcript volumes — Thirteen objects modeled and rendered in Blender, antique brass and ink lacquer

Thirteen Blender objects from the Ouzel site arriving one by one on an orrery arc, each named beneath it, the arc turning one station and the pixel ouzel resolving in the center of a catalog plate — Ouzel, the objects, After Effects

Thirteen objects already existed, so I wanted motion out of them and scripted it rather than keyframing by hand. The geometry gets solved in Python, where each object sits on the arc, how large it stands and when it arrives, a script writes those numbers into After Effects as keyframes, and the pictures render from the command line. The thirteen objects moving through it are the same Blender renders that sit on the catalog plates.

The mobile site

The first mobile build gray screened my iPhone, so phones now get exactly one WebGL context and everything else falls to CSS, SVG and 2D canvas. The orbit becomes a parchment orrery plate, four bodies turning on engraved rings, each one counter rotating so the object stays upright.

The orrery plate at phone width, four bodies revolving on engraved guide rings around the seal — The orrery plate at phone width, CSS only, one WebGL context left on the page

Result

The site runs live behind a password at tec.ltd/ouzel, still under construction, and the IP belongs to me. No traffic or enquiry figure exists for it, so I am claiming none.

Live sitetec.ltd/ouzel