Dead Art makes guitar gear that takes analog physics seriously.

The thesis is two sentences. Modern engineering harnessing analog physics — contemporary engineering doesn't replace the physics, it makes it more accessible. Constraint as freedom — bounded systems make expressive ones. The pedal format is the constraint that makes a high-voltage tube preamp portable. The colour language is the constraint that makes its controls intuitive.

The name comes from an art-world refrain. Painting is dead — declared periodically, usually right before the medium reinvents itself. Analog is the same. The provocation Analog is dead says we don't accept the premise. The descriptor modern analog. says what we are without performing.

Dead Art is for players who think about tone seriously. The niche is purists — how it feels and sounds is primary, and the interaction between how it sounds and feels is what informs what they play. When something doesn't feel right, they can't actually play it. They are also pragmatists. They want the convenience and flexibility that traditional tube amplifiers don't give them.

"For me digital doesn't cross the uncanny valley. I'd rather explore than build better maps. And there is much yet to explore. We can work on the impractical."

— Eli Stowe, 2026

Dead Art writes the way the products feel.

Considered, confident, dry. Short sentences. Present tense. No jargon, no hype. The register is contemplative, minimalist, intelligent, optimistic, dry. It emerged from writing about something deeply felt, not from a marketing brief. Can this be distilled? Fewer words. Sometimes a full stop says what a word could.

Style rules

• Short sentences. Three to ten words is the right range for most lines.
• Present tense. The product does, not will do.
• No adjectives that announce themselves. "Premium", "elevated", "best-in-class" — none.
• No exclamation marks.
• No "we believe", "we think". State the position.
• One thing per sentence.
• A fragment can be the right answer.

Examples

Left column is real copy from the speakers^{[ ]} mockup. Right is constructed for contrast.

Naming & punctuation

• pre³ — always lowercase, 3 in superscript. pre<sup>3</sup> in HTML, pre³ in plain text. Never Pre3.
• speakers^{[ ]} — always lowercase, brackets in superscript. speakers<sup>[]</sup>. No plain-text fallback for the brackets.
• Dead Art in two words, capitalised.
• modern analog. lowercase, terminal period — load-bearing, keep it.
• Analog is ████ with same-colour redaction concealing dead.
• British spelling throughout: colour, behaviour, standardised, dialling.
• Em dash with space either side — like this. Sentence case in headlines.

Anti-library

What we don't sound like:

• Tech startup — "Imagine if…" · "Reimagining what's possible."
• Boutique handmade — "Lovingly crafted from the finest materials."
• Vintage cosplay — "Capturing the magic of the golden era."
• Mass-market guitar gear — "Get your tone! Crank it up!"
• Performative authenticity — "Real talk — we made this for you."

Real environments, led by real light.

Every Dead Art photograph puts the product in a real environment, led by real light. The product is never isolated in a lightbox or cut out of its surroundings — the environment is part of the photograph. The mood is calm and unhurried.

Minimalism

Minimalism here isn't a look. It's what lets the details show. Remove the clutter and what's left — texture, grain, the way light falls across a surface — has room to be seen. The photograph rewards closer inspection: there is always something you catch on the second look.

White on white is the clearest case. A white product on a white surface, and the only thing left to see is texture. That is the brand, really — it rewards looking closely, the same way the gear rewards listening closely.

Look for the metaphor

When you choose an environment, look for one that means something. An ocean bath is an engineered structure that contains a wild environment — a calm, bounded body of water with a chaotic ocean just beyond it. A clear metaphor for the pre³: engineering that channels something powerful without taming it.

Most environments won't carry an idea this cleanly, and that's fine. But when one does, the photograph gets to hold a mood and an idea at the same time. Look for it.

The shoot list — placeholders for what's needed

References — not a style to copy

Anti-photography

• Lightbox photography, or product cut out of its surroundings and dropped onto white.
• Busy pedalboards, clutter, cables arranged for decoration.
• Faces, players, lifestyle staging. Workshop hands and process B-roll are fine.
• Renders, AI-generated imagery, stock photography.

The surface is material, not slate.

Every digital surface lives on a real ground. This page is not a blank screen — there's a grain on it, the way a printed page holds paper texture or a photograph holds inertia in shadow. It should be subtle by design. If it reads as texture straight away, the effect is too strong. It should reward closer inspection. The same as the gear.

The digital equivalent of the photography brief. When the camera isn't there, the surface itself carries the environment.

Print and physical surfaces

The same logic carries to print and physical product. Uncoated paper, not glossy. Embossed or debossed marks where they would sit. Material that holds its own grain, not a printed simulation of grain. The principle is the same: be a surface, not a description of one.

Anti-pattern

Pure white screens. Hard digital gradients. Drop shadows that pretend the page is a card on a desk. Anything that performs depth without earning it. The brand's depth is supplied by the ground itself; nothing else needs to mimic it.

Assets

• assets/photography/textures/grain.jpg — light ground texture.
• assets/photography/textures/grain-inverted.jpg — dark ground texture (pre-inverted).

Both derive from a single white-noise photograph, exported at source resolution for finer detail.

CSS pattern

body {
  background-color: var(--c-snow);
  background-image:
    linear-gradient(rgba(225, 225, 219, 0), rgba(225, 225, 219, 0)),
    url('assets/photography/textures/grain.jpg');
  background-attachment: fixed, fixed;
  background-size: cover, 600px;
  background-position: center, center;
  background-repeat: no-repeat, repeat;
  background-blend-mode: normal, overlay;
}

:root.theme-dark body {
  background-color: var(--c-mineshaft);
  background-image:
    linear-gradient(rgba(38, 38, 38, 0.1), rgba(38, 38, 38, 0.1)),
    url('assets/photography/textures/grain-inverted.jpg');
  background-blend-mode: normal, lighten;
}

/* Text integrates with the ground */
:root          { --text-blend: multiply; }
:root.theme-dark { --text-blend: screen; }
h1, h2, h3, p, li, blockquote, th, td { mix-blend-mode: var(--text-blend); }

One text face for everything else.

The text face is Montserrat. The system is two typefaces and no more: the logo mark, plus one text face for everything else.

Display specimen

Special cases

• Numbers — all digits sit on a fixed-width grid. The digit "1" would otherwise be narrower than "8", so columns of prices, specs, and any number that changes in place (a quantity stepper, a live total) don't line up. Set font-feature-settings: 'tnum' on body.
• speakers^{[ ]} and pre³ — the brackets and the 3 sit in superscript. Part of the wordmark, not punctuation.
• All-caps — small labels and buttons only, always letter-spaced. Never headlines or body.

The brand is monochrome.

Colour comes from the product itself — its LEDs — or from the real environment it sits in. It is never assigned by the brand.

Brand palette · two tonal pairs

White is the dominant ground.

Within a pair · texture, not contrast

The two tones of a pair work together — Snow Drift on white, Black on Mine Shaft — to build texture and depth. The difference is quiet: closer to texture than to contrast. Where communication is secondary — packaging especially — text can be set this way too. The low contrast is the point.

Across the pairs · for reading

Where text must be read — the web, anywhere communication is primary — colour crosses the pairs: a light tone on a dark ground, or a dark tone on a light one. Snow Drift on Mine Shaft reads cleanly; so does Mine Shaft on Snow Drift. These pairings must clear WCAG AA. Body text is not pure black — a softened near-black keeps it participating in a composition rather than sitting on top of it.

Product light, not design colour

The pre³'s LEDs glow aquamarine, white, and warm amber. These colours appear in the brand only in real photography — as actual light, captured. They are never decomposed into digital accents. Aquamarine is not a button colour, a text highlight, or a graphic fill. A swatch lifted from a photograph and reused in a layout is the colour performing — detached from the thing that made it.

Retired

Pure Blue #0400ff. The brand is quiet; this colour pitched. Exclaimed modernity instead of embodying it. Failed the decision filter (see 03).

Typography is the grid.

White space

White space is not empty space. It is the room that lets a single element — a product, a line of type, a mark — be looked at properly. Dead Art layouts are generous with it. When a layout feels crowded, the fix is almost always to remove something, not to rearrange it.

The grid

Type sits at consistent sizes and consistent positions across a surface, and that regularity is the structure everything else hangs from. Imagery improvises within that frame — full-bleed, off-centre, any crop — because the type holds the order. Spacing scale, columns, container widths, and breakpoints are set on the build, against real content. The principle that governs them: generous, consistent, quiet.

Strong images stand alone

When a product image can carry a surface on its own, let it. Type goes small and quiet, or disappears. A full-frame product shot with no copy is a confident move, not an unfinished one.

The edge label

A short label naming the current section, set along an edge of the frame. The 2024 guide ran it vertically up the side of each spread; the speakers^{[ ]} mockup runs it along the bottom-left. Same device — a quiet "you are here" — with the orientation chosen per surface. The bottom-left label on this document is the same primitive in use. Its web behaviour is documented in Components.

Motion is a toolkit, not a rulebook.

What follows is directions to try, not a specification. The one constant: motion stays quiet. It supports an action, eases a transition, or reveals something on scroll — and when it starts moving for its own sake, it gets pulled back.

Directions to try

• Respond quickly. UI that answers immediately feels alive; slow transitions feel sluggish. Start short.
• A clean ease-out usually fits — motion that starts with intent and settles. Bounce and spring tend to feel wrong here. Try things and see.
• One movement at a time reads calmer than several at once.
• Tie motion to something — a scroll, a click, a state change. Motion tied to an action lands; motion running on its own rarely does.

The bracket-shutter — speakers^{[ ]} keystone

The [ ] opens and closes around content. Not just a transition — the brackets are the speakers^{[ ]} symbol, and the empty space between them holds the product's whole idea. The infinite complexity of the amp-and-speaker interaction. The chainability of speakers^{[ ]} itself, units linked together to expand what fits between them. Closing frames a moment; opening reveals what's inside.

Reduced motion

Not optional. Where prefers-reduced-motion is set, transitions go instant or near-instant, scroll-driven effects resolve to their end state, and nothing autoplays. The page still works — it just holds still.

What tends to go wrong

• Several animations competing at once.
• Parallax with no purpose.
• Scroll hijacking — taking the scroll away from the reader.
• Decorative loops and idle motion: things moving when nothing happened.

Reusable interface patterns.

Established by the speakers^{[ ]} launch page. The working code is canonical in sites/speakers/mockup/speakers-page.html; treat that file as the source and this section as the map. When a site is built, patterns are extracted from the mockup and refined.

The page is the experience.

A Dead Art page is one continuous scroll. It is not a brochure with a product dropped into it — the scroll itself is the experience. The reader moves through the product by moving through the page.

Earn the scroll

Each section earns the next. The page pulls the reader forward through curiosity and partial answers, not through calls to action. A section that doesn't make you want the next one is doing nothing — cut it or fix it.

The beat rhythm

The page moves through alternating dark and light sections: immersion, then breathing space, then immersion again. Not every section is a hero moment — the quiet sections do as much work as the loud ones. The dark/light alternation also drives the floating chrome.

Commerce is earned

The buy bar appears after the first beat, never at the hero. Commerce arrives once the reader is interested, not before. Purchase happens inline — no modal, no redirect to a separate store. The reader never leaves the experience to buy.

Microcopy

Buttons, form labels, errors, empty states, the 404 — all written in the brand voice (see 02). Short, plain, dry. A 404 page is still Dead Art: it doesn't apologise theatrically or strain to be funny. It says what happened and offers the way back.

The floor — not optional

• Mobile-first. Most readers arrive on a phone. The page is designed for that first, then scaled up.
• Fast and light. Images compressed and right-sized; quick to load on a phone connection.
• WCAG AA. Contrast, focus states, target sizes, alt text in the brand voice.
• Reduced motion respected — see 10.
• Core content works without JavaScript. Motion and enhancement layer on top.

Platform

Shopify. The commerce infrastructure — payments, inventory, shipping, security — is Shopify's job. The brand experience lives in a custom theme: custom Liquid sections, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Start there; migrate later only if the brand outgrows it.

The working reference is the speakers^{[ ]} mockup at sites/speakers/mockup/speakers-page.html.

Packaging, socials, press.

The map of every brand asset.

Brand assets — click to download

Repo references — not in this deploy

Canonical sources in My Drive/DEAD ART/

Design source files stay in Google Drive — the source of truth. Pulled into the repo as web-ready exports when needed.

Still needed

Carried forward · Retired.

Carried forward from the 2024 Rebrand Guide

• Primary logo lockup (stacked DEAD / ART with horizontal rule)
• Clearspace rule (D-based, 25mm minimum)
• Snow Drift #e1e1db, Mine Shaft #262626
• Vertical sidebar label as a per-page system primitive
• The small D̄ page-identifier mark in top-left
• The redaction tagline mechanism (now resolved as same-colour redaction)

Retired from the 2024 Rebrand Guide

• Pure Blue #0400ff — pitched modernity instead of embodying it
• Sub-brands DEAD ART MEDIA / LIVE / SOUNDS — premature, one mark for now
• "Analog is dead" uncovered version — only works with same-colour redaction
• ® on compositional surfaces — performs legitimacy

Source canon

Drafted content is distilled from the Obsidian vault:

• ~/My Drive/Obsidian Vault/_projects/dead-art/brand-dna.md
• ~/My Drive/Obsidian Vault/_projects/dead-art/speakers-visual-strategy.md
• ~/My Drive/Obsidian Vault/_projects/dead-art/speakers-product-discovery.md
• ~/My Drive/Obsidian Vault/_projects/dead-art/photography-system.md