turbozine design engine / early access 00

Issue 00 Enginerefs → tokens → theme → pages

From magazine refs to a working frontend

Turbozine

Feed it pictures. Magazine spreads, posters, a shoebox of flyers, whatever you stole the look from. It reads the palette, the type, the grid, the dirt, and hands back a design system and pages that actually ship.

click here >>Get early access See the first zine
01

What
it is

Words: the engine / Pictures: yours

Every design tool starts with a blank page and a palette picker, and that is exactly backwards. Nobody starts from nothing. You start from a stack of magazines on the floor, a photo of a poster on a wall in Lisbon, a screenshot of a site you will never admit you liked. turbozine starts there too. Drop the folder in. It quantizes the colours, throws out the greys that are just shadows, decides which ones are background, which are ink and which are the signal. It measures the energy of the pictures, the edge density, the grain, how much of a spread is text and how much is just black. Then it argues with a rule table and comes back with opinions: condensed display type or wide, mono body or grotesk, three columns or one, how loud the scanlines should be, whether chrome is allowed.

Out the other side: a tokens file, a theme stylesheet with the components and effects already wired, a recipes sheet that tells a human how to compose with it, and a renderer that turns content JSON into pages. The first thing built with it was a trip report about volcanoes and sharks. It took one evening and it looks like the magazine it was stolen from. That is the whole pitch. Bring references, leave with a frontend.

How it works / four moves

  1. p. 01 Analyze Palette, contrast, energy, grain, text density. Per image, then across the set.
  2. p. 02 Tokens Colours with roles, type stacks, scale, tracking, grid, effect intensities. With confidence and reasons.
  3. p. 03 Theme One stylesheet. Poster, textwall, bleed, index, gallery. Scanlines, grain, chrome, VHS, duotone, ticker.
  4. p. 04 Render Content in, pages out. Or hand the theme to a human and let them go feral. 
$ turbozine analyze ./refs --out ./design
measured 17 refs
signal #fce602 #fb5e2b #35f966  mood: dark-first, loud, punk zine, grainy, chrome
$ turbozine render design/tokens.json content.json --out index.html
05

Proof

Issue 22, CENTRAM 26. Seventeen magazine photos went in. A trip report, nine promo images and this page came out. Same engine, same theme file, no designer harmed.

read it >>korf.us/centram
CENTRAM 26 hero: chicken bus with acid green headline
The zine. One page, four countries.
Nine Instagram promo images in a 3 by 3 grid
Nine promos, rendered from the same theme.

Early access program / issue 00

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