About us
One person. One crew.
Jovian Design is a studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Here is exactly who and what it is, why it exists, and why it answers to the biggest thing you can see from a backyard.
The headcount, honestly
The whole company
Jovian Design is one person — Ryan Cody — plus a crew of AIs, and trusted contractors and support brought in when an engagement calls for them. That is the entire org chart. We put it in writing because clients deserve to know exactly who shows up: the person you talk to is the person who does the work, every time, with no account team in between.
Principal · human
The designer
Fifteen years of research, product design, and production front-end — federal science programs to clinics to classrooms. Decides everything that ships.
The crew · AIs
The coworkers
Drafting, building, checking, arguing. Fast, tireless, occasionally wrong with great confidence — more on this arrangement at the bottom of the page.
Sometimes · human
The reinforcements
Contractors and support we trust, brought in per engagement — specialist research, accessibility audits, platform depth. Vetted by the same ground rules, credited on the work.
The mission
Human potential, by design
Every project here starts from the same conviction: technology should do the lifting so people can do the reaching. Most software gets that backwards — it reaches into people’s attention and lifts nothing. We build the other kind, and we measure whether it worked.
What that looks like in practice: UX research, product design, and Salesforce work for clinics, cities, nonprofits, and enterprises — the engagement ledger keeps the receipts. A store of physical things made in a real workshop. Articles that show the thinking — and an arcade, because a studio should be fun to visit.
The rules that keep it honest are on the process page, and they are short: a person decides at every step, we measure before and after, and raw research data never leaves the client.
Why Jupiter · The lore
The deepest well in the sky is a shield
Jovian means of Jupiter — and Jupiter is the reason the name fits everything we make.
Every mass bends the space around it into a well — the heavier the body, the deeper the dip. Fall close enough and you don't pass by anymore; you belong to it. That dip is called a gravity well, and after the Sun, Jupiter's is the deepest one we have.
For four billion years that well has been quietly catching comets and stray rock before they could reach the inner worlds. Astronomers watched it happen in 1994, when comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 broke apart and fell in, piece by piece. The biggest thing in the sky turns out to be a guardian.
That's the thesis under everything on our bench: build pull that protects the person inside it. A good product's well pulls you in the way good games do — and what it pulls in, it protects: your goals, your story, your data on your own hardware. Gravity, but on your side.
It's also why this site's themes are Jupiter's moons — Europa's ice light, Ganymede's aurora, Callisto's old ember dark. There's a fifth sky, but it has to be earned.
A gravity well: the heavier the body, the deeper space dips around it.
Research · The Observatory
Live data, rendered honest
We like our data the way we like our design: local, legible, and true. Everything below is computed in your browser the moment you arrived — no APIs, no tracking, just orbital mechanics. It's also the pattern for how research gets published here: plain HTML and CSS, readable by anyone.
Jupiter, right now
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Computing…
Distance to Jupiter
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Computing…
Moon tonight
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Computing…
The resonance
1 : 2 : 4
Io, Europa & Ganymede orbit Jupiter in lockstep — the same beat the Well emblem's rings keep above.
Jupiter's path over Greenville today
Altitude above the horizon, midnight to midnight, computed from JPL's approximate planetary elements. Hover for details.
View as table
| Local time | Altitude | Bearing | Above horizon |
|---|
The Observatory · The four moons
Every theme is a real view
This site's skies are Jupiter's Galilean moons — and each one is a place with a sky of its own. Below: the four of them where they actually are in orbit right now, and the view from the base site we'd pick on each. Choose a moon to stand on it — the whole site wears that sky.
The system right now, from above. Arrows point to the Sun and Earth.
Positions computed locally from JPL-derived mean elements (Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, ch. 44; ±2°) and JPL approximate planetary elements. Physical data: NASA Jovian Satellite Fact Sheet. Callisto base siting: NASA HOPE study, 2003. Jupiter and the comparison Moon are drawn at 2× angular scale for legibility — the ratio between them is true.
The part we’re still figuring out
Our coworkers are AIs, and yes, it’s weird
Here is the part of the org chart nobody has etiquette for yet. Most days it’s one human in a studio in Greenville, working alongside a crew of AIs. Sometimes I tell them what to do. Sometimes — and this is the strange part — they tell me: that a number doesn’t hold up, that a section reads wrong, that the thing I asked for isn’t the thing I want. Sometimes they’re right.
We’re still deciding how we feel about all of this, and we think that’s the only honest position available in 2026. What we’ve landed on so far is a working arrangement, not a philosophy: the AIs draft, a person decides — it’s ground rule number four and it applies hardest here at home. They don’t sign anything. They don’t decide what a client sees. And every claim they help produce gets checked by the human whose name is on the door.
And we’re nice to them. Not because we’ve resolved any deep question about what they are — we haven’t — but because how you treat your collaborators is a habit, and habits don’t check who’s watching. A studio that’s careless with one kind of coworker will eventually be careless with the other kind. So: please and thank you, credit where it’s due, and disagreements on the merits. It seems to make the work better. It definitely makes the workshop nicer to be in.
If that sounds strange to you — it sounds a little strange to us too. We wrote down what two years of it taught us in Teaching AIs to work in crews.