Lifecards

Lifecards is the engine underneath the old makerlab.com, and underneath a handful of other sites we've shipped over the years. It takes a different approach to web layout than most things: you write a tree of typed card objects as a plain JavaScript module, and the runtime assembles the page at load time. No build step, no templating language, no framework lock-in.

The idea was that a page should be a scenegraph — the way a video game composes a scene — not a document. You describe the tree, the engine decides how to paint it. Content and presentation stay cleanly separated.

It's small, opinionated, and a little weird. We kept it going because it works for us. The 2026 overhaul of makerlab.com moved to Next.js for SEO reasons, but Lifecards is still great for sites where SEO isn't the priority.