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Episode7

We're live! Say hello to sookthecrab.com

 · by Josh · 2 min read

The new SOOK logos on navy: a shield badge with a grinning blue crab, a round rope badge, the crab mascot, the SOOK wordmark held in the crab's pincers, and a faceted crab icon in blue, orange and rainbow

Today SOOK got a front door. sookthecrab.com is live.

Until this morning the site was a one-line placeholder. Everything about SOOK lived in our private build docs: drawings, weights, race plans, a lot of very serious spreadsheets about a crab. That's great for building her. It's not great for telling anyone what we're up to.

What's on it#

  • Meet SOOK: what she is, what she does and why she's a sook (a mature female blue crab, for the non-Marylanders).
  • True Colors: tap through her three-act show, blue, steamed and rainbow. The background is her shell: little triangles that flip in a wave, just like the real ones will. Go ahead and drag your finger across it.
  • The race: the route from the museum to the Canton splashdown, the sand and the mud, and what it takes to finish with ACE.
  • The build log: this. Episode by episode, from the night at the Halloween parade to today.
  • The crew: crab avatars instead of photos, because we're a crab team. More faces join after the kickoff.
  • Sponsors and a press kit, for anyone who wants to help or write about us.

A logo, finally#

Up to now our "logo" was a little crab I drew in code next to the word SOOK. This week we tried 27 logo ideas with an AI image tool, picked our favourites and had them redrawn as real, clean logos. You'll see the new family all over the site: a shield badge with our grinning mascot, a round rope badge, a wordmark held in the crab's pincers, and a faceted crab icon that comes in blue, steamed and rainbow. Our art lead gets the final say, so they may still change a little.

The SOOK logo family on one sheet: each logo on white, on navy and in one colour, the crab icon in blue, steamed and rainbow, and the little browser-tab icon
The whole family: on white, on navy, in one colour, and down to a 16-pixel browser tab.

How it got built#

Same way as everything else on this project: me and Claude, working through it together. We sketched three different looks for the site, mixed the two I liked into one ("Harbor Feast": harbour navy, steamed-crab orange, crab-house paper) and built it out from there. A whole site in a day still feels a little like cheating. The fun part is that it's the same tools that are designing her frame and simulating her race, now pointed at telling her story.

What's next#

  • Nov 14: the kickoff party. Family, friends and neighbours pick their jobs.
  • December: the first real metal, and the first big test before anyone climbs aboard.
  • May 1, 2027: race day.

Follow along here, tell a friend, and if you know a business that would like its name on a giant crab, the sponsor page is open.

See you on the water. 🦀

Follow along: the RSS feed, or @sookthecrab. Select any sentence to share it.