About us

A small studio that likes small software

Viridian Creations builds modular applications, custom micro-utilities and game engines. We are deliberately small, we keep our dependency list short, and we would rather ship something narrow that works than something broad that nearly does.

Most of what we make is free and runs entirely in your browser. The rest is client work, built the same way.

Fog settling over the tops of a spruce forest

Fast, small, and still here in five years

That is the whole brief we give ourselves. Everything below is what it means in practice.

How we got here

Viridian Creations started as a set of utilities built to scratch our own itches — a password generator that reported honest entropy, a QR generator that didn't phone home, a timer that survived a backgrounded tab. Enough of them turned out to be useful to other people that they became the product.

The studio work grew out of the same habit: build the thing properly, write down why it was built that way, and leave it in a state someone else can pick up.

Moss-covered trees on a leaf-strewn forest floor at dusk

What we hold to

Three things we will not trade away, even when it would be faster to.

  • Small on purpose

    Every dependency is one more thing that can break, get abandoned, or ship a vulnerability. We add one when it earns its place and pin it to an exact version when we do.

  • Yours, not ours

    The tools process your files in your browser. There is no upload endpoint, no account, and no analytics on what you put in — not as a policy we could quietly change, but as an absence of the code that would do it.

  • Built to be maintained

    Software is read far more often than it is written. We favour the boring, legible version over the clever one, and we write down why a decision was made while we still remember.

How we work

Three steps, in this order, on everything we take on.

  1. 01

    Understand the real problem

    The brief and the problem are rarely the same thing. We spend the first part of any project working out which one we have been handed.

  2. 02

    Build the smallest honest version

    Something running beats something specified. The first build is deliberately narrow, and it is real — not a prototype we intend to throw away.

  3. 03

    Harden it, then hand it over

    Tests, types and documentation are part of the work, not a phase after it. What we hand over is something the next person can pick up without us.

Working on something?

If you have a project that wants building properly, or a utility you keep wishing existed, tell us about it. We read everything and reply to what we can take on.

Get in touch