About Canned Tuna

The people who painted pinball backglasses were not afraid of color.

Saturated blues. Glowing reds. Impossible purples. Neon greens.

The same nerve ran through cereal boxes, film posters and magazine spreads of the same decades. Forty years on, that work still looks alive, and a great deal of what shipped last month already does not. We have spent an unreasonable amount of time working out why.

The short answer is that those designers were committing to something. A backglass had one shot at catching a fourteen year old across a noisy arcade. It could not afford to hedge, so it did not. Hedging is most of what makes new work look tired.

That conviction is what we bring to software with no business being interesting. A metadata stripper. A calculator. A color you can put full screen. Tools like those are usually built by a developer who needed one, and they work, which is where the thinking tends to stop. Ours get the treatment a paying client would get: the copy written, the palette chosen, the interface argued over until it is obvious.

This shop came to code the long way round. Art school was the plan and the U.S. Army was what happened instead. The internet turned out to be the canvas still available afterwards, and two decades of building sites and brands for other people, work that still runs as Kinsey Street, is where the opinions above came from.

None of it starts with a business plan. We buy a domain we like, look hard at what already exists, and build the version we wished we had found.

The range in here runs from people who remember loading the internet off an AOL disc to people who have never heard of one. Old westerns and anime. Pinball and eSports. The taste gets inherited in both directions.