A launch is never one asset. It's a website, a film, a deck, a week of posts, sometimes a physical invitation, and all of it has to read as one thing on a founder's timeline. "Speed and the bar for what you create on the asset level is higher than ever," Jacky says.

It's why the team turned to FLORA, to help build two websites and support the launches for two different things. One is for Eigen, and the second one for Camp Hard Launch.

Bringing the Eigen office to life, online

Lucas Quan, growth and design at Hard Launch, built a small skeuomorphic world for Eigen: a warm retro office, a window onto a city skyline, a shelf of objects you can poke at. The shelf was the hard part. "There's a bookshelf in the website, for example, that I would have had to manually create by hand," Lucas says. "With different shadows and different overlays."

The Eigen homepage: a retro office with a CRT monitor, a typewriter, a window onto a city skyline, and a shelf of objects.

He built it on the canvas instead. What mattered was consistency: every object on that shelf had to sit in the same light as the room around it, or the whole illusion falls apart. "FLORA was incredible in retaining the visual style of this skeuomorphic and very playful look," Lucas says.

One of the objects is a toy tyrannosaur. "When you hover on the asset in the website, it comes to life and it roars."

A shelf on the Eigen site holding a set of jacks, a toy tyrannosaur, two bowling pins and a painted figure.

A warm camp invitation on a website

Then the studio pointed the same process at itself. Camp Hard Launch is a two-day, all-expenses-paid retreat they run at a Sonoma County campsite in early October, and the invitation had to feel like one.

"The idea was to have our website be a postcard from camp," Lucas says. "We kind of came to this end result of this campsite in this oil painting style, and it is very immersive."

The Camp Hard Launch site: a painted postcard of a tent and a campfire, lying on a desk with polaroids, a camcorder and a typed letter.

It is a postcard, literally. A tent by a fire at dusk, painted, a HARD LAUNCH CA postmark in the corner, and a line in script telling you to flip the card and apply. On the back is a typed letter that opens "Dear Future Camper" and is signed by the six people who run it.

On the canvas that postcard starts as one painting, becomes a row of variants, and then the strongest few get animated so the fire moves and the river ripples underneath it. "Seeing both motion and the still images of what we were hoping for together is the strength of FLORA," Jacky says.

The happy accidents

"I think that we're at a point where good static graphics are like table stakes," Jacky says. "And even motion in these graphics are kind of the bare minimum now."

What the canvas gives them is width. "What I love about FLORA is the happy accidents," Jacky says. "Where one node turns to two to a thousand, and then you sort of see what kind of came up from all your different explorations."

Check out Camp Hard Launch here.

Hard Launch does exactly what their name describes, they hard launch startups into the world. "Most often times that's an out of stealth announcement, fundraising, product, or all three," says Jacky Huang, who founded the studio. "We come in as their marketing team, because we execute across all of these surfaces."