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Around 2024, I explored splitting the club into three branches: The Rowboat Club, The Parcade, and The Nightclub. Each had a black pixel wordmark and an icon: an oar, a red joystick, or a red microphone. We liked the design, but it felt too serious and dark for PARC. We set it aside.

The old logo was a cartoon ape with thick outlines and a bubbly wordmark. It didn’t look much like the pixel art around it. I drew the new logo on the apes’ 5×5 grid and put it on a white sign with notched corners.

The team was attached to the old identity and worried about how the community would react. This time I showed them the finished logo on its sign and asked them to trust me. The comments after launch were encouraging.

I built PARC Pixel from the four letters in the logo: one-cell strokes, open counters, and stepped diagonals. Scripts derive the family from the logo’s grid: three weights and a monospaced version for scores and prices, 56 glyphs in each. It took four days from the first glyph to the finished family.

The scripts struggled with some characters, especially the number 2. I built a small editor to place pixels by hand, then used the scripts to compile the fonts. I drew 29 glyphs across the family this way, including the bold 2, the oar, and all three at-signs, and checked them in words at reading size.

Beyond the site, the identity runs through Discord, X, Twitch, merch, and the arcade. After Darc, the club’s Twitch show, has its own graphics and a starting-soon animation for the stream.

PARC had outgrown its Squarespace site. The club now had four collections, a token, a Twitch show, an arcade, and merch. I designed a new site to bring them together and built it with Claude Code, directing the implementation and reviewing each screen.

I built the site around the logo’s pixel grid and the club’s island setting. The Clubhouse, Gallery, and PARCade each have their own place in that world. The home page opens with the wordmark on a notched paper card. Inner pages use a jungle canopy, drifting clouds, and a wooden sign for the title and introduction.

The notch runs through the whole site: 6px on buttons, 10px on cards, and 12px on panels. Buttons sit above a darker base, lift on hover, and drop when pressed. Movement follows the pixels too: buttons move in steps, water shifts one cell at a time, and dropdowns open line by line. The animated backgrounds switch to still versions with reduced motion.

I put Stats first in the navigation so holders could get to it quickly. It shows floor prices, trading volume, holders, and listings for the collections, alongside $OAR token data. The numbers come from the ledger and marketplace APIs. Daily snapshots feed the charts, with history starting at launch.

In the Gallery, apes hang on clotheslines between two trees. Selecting a frame opens a plaque with the ape’s name. My first version turned wheel input into sideways scrolling. It was awkward to use, so I switched to normal vertical scrolling.

The Clubhouse took three layouts to get right. It ended up with a TV playing the Twitch stream, a trophy shelf, and a corkboard for events, suspended from branches. I checked the ropes at different screen widths to keep them attached.

PARCade is an arcade cabinet with a green CRT screen, scanlines, a joystick, and buttons that control the menu. On the homepage, a smaller screen shows the game cover beside live high scores, surrounded by scenery built from the game’s sprites.

I also made Rowboat Racer: an ape rowing down a five-lane river, dodging logs, reefs, and ziggurats. I drew the sprites on a 3px grid. The riverbanks change between beach, jungle, rock, and village scenery on each run. The server replays a run before accepting its score on the leaderboard.

I originally planned to link out to the merch store. Using its API meant I could put the catalog on the site and send people to the store only for checkout. Other sections have their own details: TV static for After Darc, drifting chat bubbles for Discord, and a working terminal for the LARC teaser. The 404 sign says you rowed off the map.