Three recipe apps — one brief, three directions

Three recipe apps

One recipe-app brief taken in three directions. Same twelve dinners, same words, same nine story beats — so the only variable is the design language. Noir and Daylight go further than that: they are one design under opposite light, sharing a stylesheet and every line of behaviour, which makes them the cleanest test there is of what darkness was actually contributing. Each opens on Explore: the choices for tonight as recipe cards, nothing decided and nothing to configure.

Five screens each — explore, recipe, cook, cookbook, list No onboarding, by brief Cards that rearrange · fresh/pantry split · live timers 393 × 852 · live and interactive

The same screen in all three directions, side by side. This is the view that actually decides it — differences in hierarchy and density show up here that are invisible when you look at one direction at a time.

All three driven from one clock, so each phone sits on the same story instant. Nothing is decided — the app opens on tonight’s choices as cards. Yesterday was 4×5 back squat, so it rearranges the row: the dinners that suit a heavy session travel forward, and the one that moves furthest arrives at the front. No dial and no figure — you can see what happened by watching the cards. These are live: push a row yourself.

Export for After Effects

Every frame is a pure function of t, so these render as an exact frame sequence rather than a screen recording — no dropped frames, no timing drift, reproducible, and re-renderable at any size afterwards. Encoding needs ffmpeg, so this builds the command; run it in recipes/.