The Ordinary Company | Cincinnati Web Design & Software Studio

IdentityInterfacesPrototypesCreative ToolsSoftwareResearch

We're a research and design studio for thinkers, makers, systems, and software.

Six disciplines, one standard.

It has to work, and it has to feel considered. Made in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, shipped everywhere.

01IdentityNaming, marks, and visual systems that hold up outside the deck.
02InterfacesProduct design for web and desktop, from wireframe to shipped UI.
03PrototypesWorking proofs in code, built to answer questions fast.
04Creative toolsInstruments for making things: timers, editors, explorers.
05Machine learningAgents, voice, and AI interfaces, built into products where they actually help.
06SoftwareFull products, engineered and maintained in the open.

Explore the studio through active experiments.

Products, prototypes, visual systems, AI tools, and open-source research built with the same design standard.

Utsuwa

An open-source web and desktop app for creating and animating AI-powered virtual characters. An alternative to xAI's Grok Companion and Razer's Project Ava.

Mizu UI

Clean, airy components for AI products: chat, voice, reasoning, and streaming, built for Svelte 5 and Tailwind v4 and installable via shadcn-svelte. Intelligence that feels light.

Design, prototype, ship.

The Ordinary Company uses research, visual systems, prototypes, and code to turn early ideas into designed experiences that feel considered.

Discover the work

Small by design.

Two co-founders, zero handoffs. Everything on this page was made by the people below.

CO-FOUNDER — DESIGN & RESEARCHCJDYAS.DESIGN

Charles J. (CJ) Dyas

Designer, technologist, and cartographer. Sets the design standard across the studio: identities, interfaces, and the systems that hold them together.

CO-FOUNDER

PORTRAIT PENDING

Alec D. Beck

Runs the parts of the studio you don't see. Bio pending. The work ships either way.

News

R&D—Jun 19, 2026

Methods and systems for AI game masters

An architecture for AI game master applications: externalized world state, deterministic adjudication, canon enforcement, portable character assets, and scene direction, with notes from our work on Utsuwa.

9 min read

Design—May 14, 2026

Designing for uncertainty: interface patterns for AI products

Interface conventions assume deterministic software. We examine what probabilistic systems change: output as proposal, latency as a material, provenance as the trust mechanism, and constrained surfaces over open chat.

7 min read

Product—Apr 16, 2026

Shipping Stargazer before splashdown

We gave ourselves until the Artemis II crew hit the water to ship a browser-based window into space. A build diary of the best deadline we never chose.

5 min read

We're in good company.

Small tools, independent builders, and open projects we like learning from, cheering on, and pointing people toward.

ProGenViz

A simple interface for tinkering with various procedural generation implementations — an educational tool for Godot developers.

@TURBOSHOOK—Procedural / Godot

itch.io GitHub

Pocket Platformer

A code-free tool for designing, playtesting, and exporting small platformer games, complete with a level editor, sprite redrawing, and retro pixel art aesthetics.

@THE L0BSTER—Game Maker / HTML5

itch.io GitHub