DESIGN SYSTEM v1.0 · THE UNIFIED DIRECTION · 16 JUN 2026

Objects made only because AI designs them.

A single premium AU sculptural lighting brand. The defensible substrate the brand strategist named: forms that could not have existed before generative geometry met 3D printing. The design system is gallery-grade — warm cream paper, eucalyptus accent, brass highlight, Fraunces italic doing the emotional work, Inter holding the UI, JetBrains Mono on every spec and price. Premium without shouting.

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Sculptural cream lamp in vast gallery space with diagonal daylight

M-001 · The cream lamp · in the gallery · drop 01

01 · Essence

The premise.

Maik makes objects whose forms are only possible because AI designs them and 3D printers make them. Premium positioning. Single category at launch (sculptural USB-C lighting). The visible craft — every layer line, every parametric ridge — is the brand signature.

VIBE

Quietly confident

The brand never raises its voice. Generous whitespace. Single bold visual gesture per screen. The serif italic does the emotional work. Confident-industrial, not handmade-charming.

VOICE

First-person, dry

Steve appears once per page, sparingly. Plain language. No slogans. No exclamation marks. No emoji. Product names read like piece titles in a gallery. Specs read like a museum plaque.

PRINCIPLE

Show the making

Every PDP carries a "how it was made" block — print time, filament weight, finishing notes, designer note from the agent fleet. The making story is the product story.

02 · Colour

A warm palette, sparingly used.

95% of the system runs on paper, ink, and a muted neutral ramp. The two accent colours (eucalyptus + brass) appear in moments — hover states, single CTAs, brand signatures. Never as background fills.

paper

#F4F1EB

paper-2

#EAE5DA

bone

#DCD3BE

line

#D0CABD

ink

#1F1A14

travertine

#3A3630

muted

#8A7E6B

eucalyptus primary accent

#5C6B57

brass highlight

#A8895F

rust state · sold-out

#A04A2C

03 · Type

Fraunces + Inter + JetBrains Mono.

Three typefaces, three roles. Fraunces (variable, optical-sized, italic-led) carries every emotional brand moment. Inter holds the UI and body. JetBrains Mono is on every spec, price, drop number, and metadata.

display

Made slowly.

Fraunces 300 italic / 0.92× / -2.5%

A modern studio brand.

Fraunces 400 / 1.0× / -1.8%

Considered every step.

Fraunces 400 italic / 1.05× / -1.2%

h3 / UI

Section heading

Inter 500 / 1.25× / -0.5%

body-large

Editorial paragraph — used on PDP intros and atmospheric blocks.

Inter 400 / 1.5× / 0

body

Body sits at 16px with 1.55 line-height. Long-form reading. Paragraphs cap at 65 characters.

Inter 400 / 1.55× / 0

caps

EYEBROWS · SECTION INDICES · METADATA

JetBrains Mono / 11px / 14% / UPPER

mono

$189 AUD · 4h print · 220g PLA

JetBrains Mono / 14px / 0

04 · Components

A small kit, deeply consistent.

Fewer components used well. Buttons in three variants. Cards with one shape. Inputs unified. No floating UI flourishes — the brand is the layout and the type, not the chrome.

Buttons

PRIMARY · GHOST · LINK

View object

Pill radius. Hover state shifts primary to eucalyptus. Ghost inverts on hover. Link is the lightest weight.

Tags / pills

OUTLINE · EUCALYPTUS · BRASS · INK

3D-printed in AU New Limited Drop 03

Outline default. Filled variants used only for moments that need attention.

Form input

EMAIL · TEXT · SEARCH

Your email

Custom engraving (10 char max)

Section indicator

NUMBERED · SLOW READING

04 · Components

A small kit, deeply consistent.

The numbered eyebrow + serif italic combo is the system's signature.

05 · Product cards

Object-first, copy second.

Tall 4:5 imagery, warm-tone backdrops, serif italic name, mono price. Hover lifts subtly. No "Add to cart" on the card itself — the card invites the click into the PDP, where the story lives.

M-001 · The Cream.

Parametric twisted-column, USB-C, 4hr print.

New $189 AUD

M-002 · The Wave.

Spiralled ridges, warm sage PLA, table lamp.

3D-printed $229 AUD

M-003 · The Cluster.

Generative coral-form, olive PLA, limited 50.

Limited 50 $329 AUD

05a · The range

One language. Many scales.

Every Maik object lives on the same parametric language — ribbed, sculptural, USB-C, plant-based PLA — but moves across scales from the 22cm desk piece to a 1.4m floor lamp. The brand's growth path is across scale and surface, not across category.

Two sculptural lamps side by side as a scale study

PAIR STUDY · M-001 + M-002 · THE RANGE EXTENDS BY SCALE

M-004 · THE FLOOR · 1.4M COLUMN · YEAR-ONE FLAGSHIP

06 · Sample PDP

The system in context.

A condensed product detail page. The first scroll is image + name + price + buy. Below that lives the slow-reading: how it was made, who made it, what the materials are, how long it takes.

DROP 01 · IN STOCK · 12 OF 50

The Cream lamp — M-001.

A parametric ribbed shell printed in plant-based PLA. The ridges trace a generative geometry that no injection mould could release. USB-C powered, warm-white internal LED, replaceable puck. Limited to 50 in this colourway.

$189 AUD free AU shipping

Print time4 hours

Material220g plant PLA

PowerUSB-C, 5W

Made inMelbourne, AU

Ships in5-7 days

ReplacesPuck only

FROM THE STUDIO

The Cream is the first object in the M series. The geometry is the result of a long generative pass — we ran the design agent against three hundred ribbed forms before this one. It prints in four hours and the surface light catches the layer lines as design, not artefact.

07 · Detail · The print as design

The layer line is the signature.

Maik does not hide the print process — it celebrates it. Every product photograph respects the layer line as material honesty. The brand is built on objects that could only have been made by a printer; the prints have to look like prints.

Macro detail of spiralled printed layer ridges

Material honesty.

Plant-based PLA, printed at 0.16mm layer height on a Bambu P1S with AMS. The horizontal ridges are not a flaw to apologise for — they are the fingerprint of the process. Photographed with raking soft daylight to make the topography visible.

The product copywriting agent (Quill) is briefed to never use the words "smooth," "flawless," "polished" or "perfect" — those are commodity-3D-print language. The Maik vocabulary is "ribbed," "carved," "sculpted," "considered."

Scale, by a hand.

One human gesture per page maximum. A hand placing the object, a hand turning the puck. Never a face, never a full model. The hand exists to give the object scale and to ground the brand in the human-craft side of the AI-fleet thesis.

The photography agent (Lumen) is briefed to use unstyled neutral-skin-tone hands, no jewellery, no nail polish, mid-gesture. The hand is service to the object, not subject.

Hand rotating the collar of a sculptural lamp

Object on stone.

Every product page carries one image of the object meeting its surface — travertine, oak, raw concrete. The shadow is a compositional element, not a byproduct. The studio agent (Lumen) treats the surface as a co-subject, the same way Aesop treats the apothecary counter.

This is the brand signature crop — used in PR, lookbooks, and on the About page. Never used as a hero on a PDP, where the product needs to lead.

08 · Lookbook

The brand in the wild.

Twelve frames generated for the launch lookbook via Higgsfield. Each composed to read as design-press editorial — Wallpaper magazine, Vincenzo De Cotiis interiors, Nilufar Gallery installation. The object placed in its natural habitat: warm light, raw concrete, oak, travertine, limewash plaster.

PHOTOGRAPHY · HIGGSFIELD AI MARKETING STUDIO · 44 SHOTS GENERATED · ART DIRECTED BY THE LUMEN AGENT · WARM-NEUTRAL EDITORIAL GRADE

09 · Motion

Restrained motion principles.

Motion supports reading. Never decorates. Every transition uses the same easing curve — cubic-bezier(0.22, 1, 0.36, 1) — so the brand feels physically coherent.

Duration tokens

--d-1: 180ms — hover state colour shift
--d-2: 320ms — card lift, button hover
--d-3: 600ms — section reveal, page transition

Principles

Every transition same easing — never parallax
Subtle lift on hover (2px), never tilt
No bounce. No spring. No ripple.
Section reveals stagger 80ms max
Never animate type

10 · Voice

A specific studio in every line.

First-person where appropriate, sparingly. Plain language. No corporate "we". No exclamation marks. No emoji. Product copy reads like a designer explaining the object, not a brand selling it. The AI-operated story lives in trade press; the on-PDP voice stays human-studio.

SAMPLE — HOMEPAGE HERO

DROP 01 · LIVE NOW

Light, made one piece at a time, in Australia.

Sculptural lamps designed by an in-house AI and printed to order from plant-based PLA. Each one takes a day. We make every piece in Melbourne.

SAMPLE — PDP "HOW IT WAS MADE"

HOW IT WAS MADE

220 grams of corn-based PLA, sliced at 0.16mm layer height, printed across four hours on a single P1S. The colourway is two filaments blended through the AMS — we tested twelve before settling on these two.

If anything arrives wrong, email us. We will reprint and resend.

11 · Do / Don't

How to keep it coherent.

Use Fraunces italic on every headline serif moment — never on body copy.

Run JetBrains Mono on every metadata, price, technical spec, drop number.

Photograph objects in natural light against warm tone backdrops, layer lines visible.

Cap paragraphs at 65 characters for reading rhythm.

Keep eyebrow + serif italic combo as the brand signature.

Number every drop (M-001, M-002, etc) — the SKU is part of the brand.

DON'T

Mix in any third typeface beyond Fraunces, Inter, JetBrains Mono.

DON'T

Use eucalyptus or brass as background fill — accent only.

DON'T

Apply gradients to text or buttons. Anywhere.

DON'T

Use emoji, exclamation marks, "we" corporate voice, or hand-drawn ornamentation.

DON'T

Hide print layer lines or photograph them as "near-injection-moulded" — that breaks the substrate.

DON'T

Put "AI-operated" or "AI-designed" on the PDP. Reserved for trade press only.

12 · The atelier

Where the printing happens.

The Maik atelier — eight BambuLab P1S printers plus one X1C reference machine in a Melbourne light-industrial studio. Photographed deliberately as architecture, not industry. Daylight, polished concrete, oak, sealed filament storage, ventilation engineered to hide. The fleet itself is part of the brand surface — and it photographs well.

The Maik atelier — six BambuLab P1S printers in a Melbourne light-industrial studio

THE ATELIER · MELBOURNE · 8 P1S + 1 X1C · 4,160 PRINT-HOURS / MONTH

Three sculptural lamp prototypes on travertine slab

The fleet, photographed as still life.

Prototypes from a Tuesday morning slicing pass. Three colourways tested on the same generative geometry. The Maik visual language treats production process the way ceramicists treat the kiln — visible, considered, never apologised for.

This crop becomes the brand's About-page hero and the Yellowtrace / Habitus pitch lead image.

13 · Agent fleet

The brand is operated by 15 agents.

Forge orchestrates 14 named specialists. Atlas writes listings. Lumen art-directs photography. Quill maintains the voice. Beacon runs paid. Sage compounds SEO. Ember runs lifecycle EDM. Anvil schedules the print queue. Hearth orders filament. Smith drafts supplier emails (never sends — per the no-outbound-without-approval rule). Echo triages customer service. Mercury handles returns. Pulse runs social. Oracle compiles the Monday digest. Herald coordinates drops. The brand's surface — what you see in the store — is the visible output of a coherent, named, accountable fleet.

SHARED · PRODUCTION

Forge · Atlas · Anvil · Hearth · Smith · Oracle

Production backbone. One instance, multi-tenant ready. The fleet's compound advantage lives here — these scale super-linearly across future brands when Maik earns the right to extend.

PER-BRAND · DIFFERENTIATION

Quill · Lumen · Pulse · Herald · Ember

Brand voice + visual identity. Each gets fine-tuned voice adapters by month 3. Where the brand-coherence work lives. Steve approves anything new; agents propose autonomously inside the brief.

CUSTOMER · ALWAYS HUMAN-GATED

Echo · Mercury · Beacon

Customer-facing surfaces. Echo triages CS, Mercury handles returns, Beacon runs paid. Every outbound email, every refund >$50, every ad goes through Steve for first 90 days. Trust earned, not granted.