Head in the Clouds
HitC
Head in the Clouds is a web generator for animated cloud backgrounds. You set how many clouds, what shape, how fast they drift and which effect renders them, and you export the loop. The editor is free; the animation costs whatever you decide above €1.99.
4
TELLS ON ONE SCREEN IS WHAT READS AS AI-GENERATED
2
STEPS TO EXPORT, AND THE PRICE ONLY APPEARS IN THE SECOND
0
ACCOUNTS AT CHECKOUT: STRIPE, AN EMAIL, AND THE FILE
Challenges
Four tells and it reads as machine-made
Head in the Clouds is a product where the output is the marketing: a canvas that fills the page, a panel of controls down one side, and a loop you can watch before deciding anything. It started from a reference nobody can find any more, a site that generated spinning heads, seen once on a phone and never bookmarked. The search for it was exhaustive and it failed: 492 domains out of one browser history, 34 out of a second, 125 tweets resolved through oEmbed, 70 shortened links followed, and every candidate rejected. What survived was not the link, it was the shape of the thing.
The brief then carried an unusual constraint, and it came before any screen: it must not look AI-generated. Not as a vibe, as a checklist. One tell does not give a product away; four on the same screen do. For a tool sold to designers and developers that is not a matter of taste, it is the whole credibility of the thing, because the audience is exactly the audience that recognises the defaults.
Process
A forbidden list, and a paywall where the value is
The forbidden list went into the design system as a rule rather than a preference: no Lucide, Heroicons or Phosphor and no emoji; none of the reflex typefaces, Inter, Geist, Instrument, Space Grotesk, DM Sans, IBM Plex, Fraunces, Playfair, Syne, Outfit or Plus Jakarta; no purple-to-blue gradient, no gradient text, no coloured glow, no glassmorphism, no giant soft shadows on everything, no badge above the title. What replaced them is ink on cold paper with no chromatic accent at all: every colour in the product comes from the canvas, a selected control inverts instead of turning blue, and colour appears only where it carries meaning. Radii vary on purpose, 2 on controls, 0 on the canvas and the panel, 6 only on what floats, with separation done by a one-pixel rule and by tone.
The money follows the same discipline. The paywall sits at export, where the value actually happens, rather than in front of the editor, which is what the research on the pattern says: show what unlocks at the moment someone wants it, and offer a path rather than a wall. Pay what you want has its own rules and they were followed rather than guessed. A suggestion between one and a half and three times the minimum reads as fair while ten times reads as manipulation, and without any suggestion at all almost everyone pays the minimum. So the minimum is 1.99 euros, 4 is pre-selected as the anchor, 9 sits above it, and an Other field refuses anything below the floor with a plain error.
Outcome
Measured shut, and not yet reconciled with the code
The design is finished and measured: 24 desktop screens and 11 mobile, zero contrast failures, zero overflows, zero forbidden typefaces, zero unstyled text, zero default layer names, and no tap target under 44 pixels on mobile. No dead destinations and no unreachable screen on either side. Checkout asks for no account at all, just Stripe and an email, and one export returns the whole pack: MP4, WebM, embed, Lottie and a PNG sequence, with a single PNG frame free.
What the numbers do not cover is that the editor now also exists in code, and the code and the design have not been reconciled. Seven tickets sit open between them: the colour picker is still the browser’s native one instead of the popover that was designed, the interface colours do not match the variables, the logo is not in, and the navigation bar does not exist yet. That is written here rather than left out, because a case study that reports only the clean half is not a measurement.
