Back to the original formula

Building LogiCola's new design language from what I found reverse-engineering the 2008 original.Two years ago, I set out to design and release an updated version of LogiCola with the goal of preserving Professor Gensler’s work and introducing a more accessible solution that could be used by students carrying any device or operating system. Since the original was built for Windows, many students were not able to use it. Today, many students use Chromebooks or mobile devices. In August, more than 100 devices in Asia visited LogiCola 3 in a single week and 72 of them did at least one exercise. Of those, 66 came from the Philippines. Over half of them were phones and tablets. This is a signal I receive with enthusiasm. The product seems to be delivering on the original promise I made in 2024. Today I’m releasing a new version that answers the feedback you shared through the Hacker News discussion, GitHub issues and email. This release brings back mastery learning through infinite translation drills and embeds some of the playfulness from the original software with my own touch. On soul sucking design The landing page prioritised the wrong goals and put more emphasis on user acquisition through an email subscription form than it did on the logic drills. Other commenters noted the design felt too modern and out of place. My initial redesign made LogiCola 3 feel like enterprise software, a departure from the vibrancy of the old interface: Making the port look modern by using a modern look makes tons of sense. The soul sucking feeling it produces comes from the modern look’s motivations, which is not the author’s fault alone, but instead from the ‘market and sell everything’ era we current live within. The colourful backgrounds that change on every refresh have been one of the defining elements of the original brand. I borrowed the colour treatment from the original, but assigned a unique palette to every set. Syllogistic and propositional logic wear different colours. This way, you’ll always know where you are. The Color dialog found in the 2008 program reveals nine colour schemes, each at three depths: Pastel, Moderate and Deep. Here are six of the schemes, with a background, a panel and a dark band along the foot. Roll the dice to see random ones, and try the three depths: DepthSchemeHere’s the screen that used to open every exercise, against the one that opens it now. Drag the slider to compare. Both the old headline, “Ready for a challenge?”, and the description were taken directly from Khan Academy. Every set featured the same screen because they were afterthoughts for a release that was focused on bringing you logic practice. The new quiz window gives you context: which set and which type of logic drill you’re in, before you advance. The drills are on the front page now, so you can pick one and get started right away. How the original made its colours Each of the little screens in the last section is composed the way the program composes a real one, from colours that are computed instead of handpicked.

How the new colours were chosen While speaking with a friend, I realised I would never be able to give LogiCola 3 an identical voice to the original because I’m not Gensler. So instead of making a carbon copy, I decided to leave my own imprint while honouring the heritage. I spent the last winter reading books about eponymous fashion houses like Gucci, Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton. Chanel has had only three official successors. Reading about how they operated and how they drew inspiration from the original source, while keeping the brand relevant and authoring new products emboldened me to wear a similar hat. I wanted to pick colours that evoked the original while bringing new excitement. And I was hoping to make every set rhyme, while keeping them different enough that you could tell them apart. The colour schemes had to work well together and in isolation. Ruxandra Duru authored a brilliant toolkit on how to combine two colours based on the amount of stimulation they can create. Later, she built a tool that suggests pairs of colours based on a selected amount of stimulation, along with Brian Li. Since this was exactly what I was trying to do, I ported the model behind it and started experimenting. Stimulation comes out of three terms: overall intensity, the lightness gap between the two colours, and the distance between their hues. The end result tells us how much visual excitement a pair generates, ranging from sleep coma to hyper excitement. I aimed to create pairs that were in between both extremes. To make the colour schemes of every set feel connected, I picked pairs within the 0.45–0.58 stimulation interval. I added white to every hue, to soften them and preferred pale surfaces over dark ones, to make the platform feel playful but not heavy. To create stronger cohesion between sets, I painted them with patterns that surface colours from the other sets. You can play with the Colour Lab below. SurfaceInkAccentStart fromSuggestCandidatespress a Suggest button to fill this rowPatternYour setMeanings and DefinitionsSpot what is wrong with a definition — too broad, too narrow, circular, or worse.σ intensity0.44ΔL0.78hue Δ135°stimulation0.583vibration0.00temperaturelukewarm + coolink on surface12.67:1AA The score has one blind spot that matters for a study tool: it knows nothing about legibility.