Core idea: Heat is attention. A kiln doesn’t decorate material — it changes what it is. Kiln applies focused, measurable heat to raw ideas until they become structure a learner can trust and touch.
This one sentence governs product, motion, colour and voice. Everything below is a proof of it.
Three vents in a chamber. The middle vent is displaced and lit: heat escaping under control. It is not a flame, letter or rounded square — it’s the product’s mental model drawn once. Reads at 16 px because it is pure geometry; earns detail at 96 px.
Colour has jobs, never moods. Ink builds; Paper breathes; Amber appears only when the learner has earned heat (correct, mastery, rewards). Violet marks the single live element on screen — the thing currently listening to you. No gradients as decoration; the only gradient allowed is literal firing inside the progress fill.
One rule: nothing moves without a cause the learner caused. Four states, Rive-ready:
Idle: slow breath, 3.2s — the instrument waits. Focus: scale 1.06 + hot vent shifts to violet; the system acknowledges your hand. Correct: single overshoot pop, hot vent fires amber, one spark ring — cause and effect in 450ms. Mastery: the tile lifts off the ground plane and holds elevated; heat is retained, not spent. Reduced-motion users get instant state colour changes, no animation.
Drag to apply heat (enqueue). The violet gate is the live element — it opens exactly when the buffer reaches capacity. Overshoot and the oldest item burns off: visible consequence, no punishment screen.
cold · enqueue items
Progression proof: completing this step fires the tile’s Correct state, then Mastery lift, then grants the Queue Shard. One continuous causal chain — the brand behaves identically in marketing, onboarding and reward.