One job, one screen
Every instrument answers one question you keep running into. The tool comes first, a plain explanation sits underneath, and there are no tabs or settings to learn.
Primitives is a set of instruments for the fundamentals of design. Each one does a single job on a single screen. It is free, needs no account and is open source.
For the work itself: setting up scales, palettes, grids and motion before they become tokens; checking something mid-task, like whether a gray is readable on white or what 18 px is in rem; learning why an answer is right; or finding one answer fast for a deck, a landing page or a favicon.
Every instrument answers one question you keep running into. The tool comes first, a plain explanation sits underneath, and there are no tabs or settings to learn.
What you set lives in the address. Send it, bookmark it or paste it into a ticket, and whoever opens it sees exactly what you saw.
Dusk Research (opens in a new tab) is a software lab that builds tools that should exist and makes them open to everyone. Each project keeps its own name.
13 primitives, 50 instruments. Tell us which one is missing from the home page, or fix and propose things on GitHub (opens in a new tab).