Welcome to Joy Code

Joy Code is a creative lab where craft meets code.

We’re Lia and Brandon, a husband-and-wife team who have spent our careers making things in very different ways. Lia comes from communications, storytelling, creative strategy, and visual work. Brandon is a software engineer and developer who has spent years building things for the web and iOS. Somewhere along the way, we realized that the things we most enjoy making tend to live somewhere in between those worlds.

We like beautiful things that work.

We like technology that feels human.

We like learning how something works well enough to make it our own.

And, perhaps most importantly, we like making things just because we’re curious about what might happen if we tried.

That's the idea behind Joy Code.

We're interested in the space where digital tools and physical making overlap. Sometimes that means software. Sometimes it means hardware. Sometimes it means photography, printing, or figuring out how to make something that probably doesn't need to exist, but would be a lot of fun if it did.

Our first project is a good example.

Ilsee is a new kind of mobile darkroom we're building around an idea that feels a little backwards at first: What if the device we already carry everywhere could become part of the process of making a traditional darkroom print?

That question has taken us down a rabbit hole of photography, software, hardware, chemistry, prototyping, and a lot of experimentation. We're still in the middle of it.

And that's part of the fun.

We're not a traditional startup. We're not a traditional design studio. We're not particularly interested in building things simply because a market analysis says we should.

We're makers.

We make things because we're curious. We make things because we see a possibility. We make things because learning how to do something ourselves is often more interesting than buying the finished version.

Between the two of us, we've worked at places including Apple, 20th Century Fox, and Sony Pictures. Those experiences taught us a lot about technology, storytelling, creative work, and building things for an audience.

But Joy Code is something different.

It's our little lab.

A place to follow an idea, see where it leads, and make something real.

We'll be sharing what we're building here: the experiments that work, the ones that don't, the things we're figuring out along the way, and eventually, the things we hope you'll be able to make with us.

Welcome to Joy Code.

We're glad you're here.

👋 Hi! We’re Lia and Brandon! 👋