Systems & DESIGN
Digital Equilibrist
Fool on a Tightrope
Structure where it matters. Play just for fun...
I’m Cseperke Papp, mad scientist of typography, visualization, and motion. I take delight in building visualizations and the systems that hold them up, experimenting with the mathematics of rhythm, type, and movement.
My most public experiment: Decision Themes, an open-source design system generator that turns a handful of decisions into a whole coherent system.
the laboratory
A solo designer lab
These are its experiments.
The common thread is visualization — systems made visible. Typographic engines, manuscript-flavored interfaces, motion tools, timelines, breathing worlds: different shapes of an inspired craft.
Decision Themes
studio DTS
Visualization experiments
VISUALIZATION SYSTEMS
We Are Patterns
Where patterns meet
The Chaos Garden. The wilder growth lives one gate over: the Pendragon Companion, Ruby’s Workshop, AI NPCs, Brink World, Animations, Videos, Scripted HUDs, Particles — experiments, fragments, and worlds in progress, unfiltered and unapologetic. Wander in when the gate opens… (Soon.)
fund the lab
Every experiment needs funding.
Here are three ways in.
- 1 Buy the mad cientist a cappucino. Small fuel, gratefully burned. Lactose free. — buymeacoffee.
- 2 Sponsor the experiments. The goal, honestly. Decision Themes and its engine, Design Constraint Validator and my Visualizations are open source; every sponsored hour is an hour the lab spends experimenting instead of invoicing — GitHub Sponsors.
- 3 Commission the lab. How it runs today: a limited number of client projects a year, chosen for fit. The biggest single way to fund the work — it just borrows the scientist while it does. Read on.
The lab is one person: me. . A film school and a traveling theatre, a glass artist’s webshop and a photography lab, a psychologist’s practice and a foundation: each world gets its own visual language, and the same care underneath.
Brand & identity systems
From logo to style guide to working templates — an identity that behaves the same on the hundredth asset as on the first.
For you if you’re tired of brands that fall apart the moment someone else touches them.
Websites & automation
The problem-solving side of a systems designer. Sites designed and built from structure to ship — for small businesses, artists, craftsmen, practices, theatres, schools — and the working system underneath: document pipelines, content workflows, AI-assisted processes that remove the busywork. A website is just the visible end of a system that works.
For you if you need a site that earns trust in five seconds — and a back office that stops eating your evenings.
Visualizations & design systems
Making complex information visible: timelines, diagrams, motion, interfaces — and design systems generated with Decision Themes, so the visual language stays coherent long after I leave.
For you if the story is a seed in your head you want to bloom on the page.
The mad project
DTS: A Design Decision System
Decision Themes, my design system generator, turns a few base decisions — size, rhythm, color — into a complete, coherent design system, derived by rule. The math underneath is public: on GitHub and npm, with a live playground at decisionthemes.com.
- 1 Change one decision and its consequences follow. No hunting through forty files for everything that depended on it.
- 2 Relational Typography: Style guides that stay true on the hundredth asset, not just in the pitch deck.
- 3 Designs survive revision. The logic holds even when the content, the language, or the brand color doesn’t.
We are Patterns
How looking ourselves as interacting patterns changes the perspective
Take the beauty of a fern: the mathematics of growth, and the pattern’s adaptation to the chaos of life. We are such patterns — and I am writing a book about how seeing life that way affects our thinking about the world, life, death, and relationships.
Stand by for Chapter 1, coming soon.
circling similar patterns
Weaving dreams by giving them structure
Thirty years ago I opened Budapest’s Dragon’s Lair RPG store and edited Rúna, Hungary’s fantasy magazine; today I run a one-woman lab building all sorts of visualizations — design systems, interfaces, motion, timelines, helpful apps — and I write books and design worlds. In between came localization projects for Electronic Arts in Madrid and eight years of marketing asset design at NeocoreGames.
I work solo, and I work with AI beside me — by necessity before it was fashionable. I have severe AuDHD and PDA; external structure isn’t a productivity hack for me, it’s how the work gets done at all. The systems I build, and the AI workflows threaded through everything I make, began as the scaffolding that keeps my own brain organized. That’s also why they hold up: they’re tested daily on the most demanding client I have.
