four sites, and the systems under them

masa is a company I co-founded with my partner Kaylee. It builds and runs sites for people who already have an audience and nowhere of their own to send it. I designed the system and I built the site.

The design language is a written document rather than a mood board, and it governs one idea: masa is the base. It went through three palettes in eight days. The first two are still in the file, marked superseded, each with the date it lost and the reason.

The mascot is the whole argument between the second and the third. Isolated in whitespace it was decorative by construction, and the markup said so out loud by shipping it aria-hidden in the most valuable space on the page. In the third it answers you.

The stylesheet still carries the older names. A token called --coral holds a cyan today, and one called --cream holds near-black, because each palette retired the one before it by changing what the names point at rather than by renaming everything downstream. Reading the live CSS tells you what order they came in.

Thirty-four standalone studies sit behind those three. Most are whole pages, built to be looked at once and ruled on.

design system · tokens · eleventy · bilingual

Boyle Heights Bestie is masa's first client, an East LA creator whose audience lives on platforms she does not own. The site gives her an address that is hers.

The build is Eleventy, with the shared chrome as partials so a change to the navigation happens once instead of on every page. A feed file carries her latest event and posts into the page, so the site stays current without her opening it.

It is built and deployed. Her own domain still answers with the site she had before this one, so it is not yet the address the public reaches.

eleventy · content feed · creator site

Kova is my ice cream company, and I wrote the Shopify theme it sells through. A hundred and twenty-three Liquid templates, sixty-four of them sections, so the store gets rearranged from the admin instead of from an editor.

This is the one piece here whose design has a number attached to it. A lid gets judged on whether it prints. A storefront gets judged on whether somebody buys.

shopify · liquid · commerce

You are looking at it. juanernesto.com is a CRT: one shell, one router, and every page arriving inside the same tube rather than replacing it.

It is hand-built static, with no build step, no dependencies and no webfonts. Fourteen pages share one chrome, and a script compares them against each other before anything ships, because the failure here is a page built by copying another page and quietly inheriting whatever was missing at the time. Nothing throws when that happens. Every page still renders.

static · no build step · one shell

Every one of these started as writing. The two palettes that lost are still in masa's document with the date and the reason, and that is why I can tell you why the third one won instead of only that it did.