Light, made into product.
BUTENKO ART STUDIO is an independent design, software & publishing studio. We treat attention, language and code as raw matter, and shape it into apps, books and media that feel inevitable.
We work small and ship like something far larger. A tiny crew directs a fleet of AI agents across research, design, writing and code, so an idea travels from first spark to released object without losing its edge.
We design and build our own products and imprints, and bring the same discipline to work made with clients — a project can arrive as an idea and leave as a running product. Every surface — a screen, a page, a frame — is held to the restraint a spectrum imposes on light.
Portfolio
8 Pages Burnaby
Web · 2026 · Editorial system · Design · Build
An independent hyperlocal magazine — eight hand-edited stories a month.
Local journalism is thinning out, and the stories closest to a place are usually the first to go. 8 Pages Burnaby answers with restraint: one issue a month, exactly eight stories, each researched, written and edited by hand. Behind the masthead a small set of Claude Code agents handle research, drafting, visual direction and SEO — and nothing publishes until an editor has read it.
The early issues went after the city's buried history: Robert Burnaby, Still Creek, Bridge Studios, Expo 86, the local punk scene. They proved a cadence one person can hold — an AI-assisted newsroom that amplifies editorial judgement rather than standing in for it.
Nuance
Web · 2026 · Concept · Product design · Build
Train the word before the word — name exactly what you see and feel.
Most language tools train delivery: pace, filler, confidence. Nuance trains the step before speech — turning an inner image or feeling into the exact word. A stimulus appears, the user says aloud what they see or feel, and the app weighs the answer for precision, then offers a sharper word drawn from the edge of their own passive vocabulary. They say it again with the better word, and spaced repetition brings it back until it is theirs.
Bilingual across Russian and English and built to work offline, Nuance grows active vocabulary and emotional granularity together. Naming a feeling more exactly turns out to be its own kind of regulation.
Resurface
Web · 2025 · Concept · Product design
A calm, offline-first companion for finding your way back from derealization.
Depersonalization-derealization leaves the world feeling distant and unreal, and the help for it is scattered across forums, videos and half-finished worksheets. Resurface gathers the recovery into one calm, offline-first place: grounding and somatic exercises, a set of small games that pull attention back into the body, an AI companion for the hours between sessions, and quiet tracking of triggers and progress.
Every screen is designed to be used on a bad day — low stimulation, large targets, nothing that asks for more than the person has. What remains is a single place to return to, day after day, until the fog thins.
English Coach
Web · 2026 · Product design · Build
English from zero, audio first — a patient tutor that learns from each mistake.
English Coach takes an adult from zero — someone who has never had room for the language and needs to hear a word before trusting it on the page. It writes its own curriculum, drills grammar in short daily sessions, synthesises audio for every sentence, and reads each mistake closely enough to teach from it. Spaced repetition decides what comes back and when.
Built on Next.js and Postgres with a generation pipeline behind it, English Coach behaves less like a course and more like a patient tutor who never loses the thread between lessons.
Wordhoard
Web · 2025 · Design system · Product design
A living dictionary — your own words, enriched and kept warm.
Wordhoard treats vocabulary as a living dictionary rather than a deck of flashcards. Words arrive with their senses, examples and connotations intact, enriched on the way in, and stay searchable and revisable as the collection grows. Spaced repetition keeps the active set warm; a weekly export turns the month's words into something to keep.
It began as a study in how a vocabulary tool should look and feel when it is designed for words specifically — down to a colour system where magenta marks meaning, not a button.
Korean Coach
Web · 2026 · Product design · Build
A personal Korean vocabulary, learned by ear and held by spaced repetition.
Korean Coach is a personal vocabulary trainer built around the ear. It starts from a curated library of around six hundred Korean words, grouped by the situations they belong to and filtered by where the learner stands with each — wanted, learning, known. Audio is generated for every entry, example sentences are written to fit, and spaced repetition carries the words forward.
The design favours one clean library over a pile of features: find the words that matter, hear them, keep them.