01
We ship our own products
They are in the stores, used by people who did not have to be polite about it. Everything we know about building came from that, not from a deck.
What we are built on
The habits behind everything we ship, and the brand that grew out of them.
budbuildscale
Everything starts as a bud
cloudbud is two words. A cloud is where our products live: on a phone, in a browser, at the end of a link. A bud is the first visible sign that something is going to grow. Together they describe the job: start small, put it where people can use it, and keep it growing long after launch.
Every product here goes through the same three stages.
01 / 03
bud
An idea small enough to ship. Not a deck or a roadmap, but a first version someone can open.
02 / 03
build
The version people actually rely on, made by the same people who designed it.
03 / 03
scale
The years after launch: releases, ratings, support. The stage that decides whether anything lasts.
How we work
02
Nothing over the wall
The people who design a thing build it and answer for it.
03
We keep what we build
A product is not a campaign. Launch is the point where the work starts being useful, so we stay with it: releases, ratings, support, the unglamorous parts that decide whether anything actually lasts.
How we sound
We never wrote a tone-of-voice guide. Read back what we publish, though, and the same four habits keep showing up.
Show, don’t claim
“Every one is live and linked.”
( Work )
Measure it
“Every pairing below is measured, not estimated.”
( Colour )
Keep it short
“Plant the seed.”
( Contact )
Say it once
“Something said twice is decoration the second time.”
( Design notes )
The mark
One rule, not a drawing: a superellipse body, two cells and one stroke. Everything else comes from the same geometry: the app icon, our typeface and the soft corners of this page.
One colour, any size
The mark is only ever ink or paper. Its cells are carved out, so it always shows the ground it sits on. Set it small and it still reads.
- 128px
- 64px
- 32px
- 16px
Minimum size is 16px. Clear space on every side is the diameter of one cell.
For app icons
For the App Store, Google Play and the home screen the mark sits inside a square one size up and turns to the opposite colour.
- 128px
- 64px
- 32px
- on paper
Colour, with its numbers
Black and white, and three greys that hold the interface together. Every pairing below is measured, not estimated. There is no accent colour: what stands out is whatever is the opposite of its ground.
- Paper
- 60%
- Ink
- 30%
- Greys
- 10%
- ink21.00:1
#000000
The mark, the type and every dark ground. Products with colours of their own never compete with it.
- paper21.00:1
#FFFFFF
Most of every view. Where long reading and the products live.
- graphite17.01:1
#1C1C1E
Cards on ink, and one quieter dark section per page at most.
- smoke6.41:1
#8E8E93
Interface only: dividers, icons, the third grey on ink. Never body text on paper.
- mist18.76:1
#F2F2F2
Cards and chips on paper. The light counterpart of graphite.
A typeface of our own
budbud is drawn from the mark: bowls are superellipses and every stroke ends round. Five weights share one skeleton. Display lines are bold and tight, body text is regular, and labels like this page’s small capitals are IBM Plex Mono.
Download budbud
Version 1.3 · 5 weights · variable, TTF and WOFF2 · 401 KB
- budbud Light300 · stroke 52
- budbud Regular400 · stroke 80
- budbud Medium500 · stroke 93
- budbud SemiBold600 · stroke 106
- budbud Bold700 · stroke 128
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 €₺$£ &@#%?! ©®™ →
İĞÜŞÖÇ ığüşöç ÀÉÎÕ ßæœø
- 225 glyphs
- ASCII + Latin-1 + Turkish
- ss02db
- dlig;)
Plant the seed.
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether we are a fit.