Hey. I’m Dave Bloom. I design tools that encourage and enable less-techy people to create value with the web.

Hello

Ginger Soul is a redhead-founded, Toronto-based web studio.

I design, build, and maintain products that help people make things with their web browsers. Minimal websites for pop-up consulting. Chill beats. Educational tools. Stuff like that.

Current Projects

Here’s what I’m working on in 2021.

Soul Sites

Quick one-page profile websites for freelancers who don’t have time to do the whole site-building thing.

soulsites.co

Downbeat

Make chill beats with your web browser. Discover independent artists, cross genres, download arrangements with ease. Use anywhere you need a beat.

downbeat.io

Soul Plugins

Layout, animation, and typography tools for Beaver Builder and WordPress. Some eye candy, some responsive layout stuff.

gingersoulrecords.com

Future Projects

A few bright ideas in the pipeline.

Soul Books

Book websites for thought leaders, storytellers, and non-bloggers with bright ideas. A cleaner, more user-friendly alternative to blogging.

Learning Boards

Design custom educational games instead of relying on software developers to get it right.

Ad-free Kitchen

A simple, limited-ingredient online cookbook that isn’t drowning in advertising and other food-blog obstacles.

Medians.co

A stand-up comedy index.

User Designed Experience (UDX)

Calling out design refreshes, flipping UX Design on its ass and a proposition: that we let users have more control over the way they receive, view, and manipulate information on the web.

Inspiration

This is a short list of the people & companies that inspire me to do what I do.

Bret Victor

I credit Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle as the talk that shaped my entire mission. I used to think of myself as a humble craftsman, slinging CSS and JQuery on top of WordPress to build people’s websites. After watching this talk, I realized that I wanted to make a real difference on the web and in the culture.

If you’re looking to ‘get into the tech space,’ or you’re already here, do yourself a favor and watch it.

I also highly recommend his other lectures on his website – specifically, Stop Drawing Dead Fish and The Humane Representation of Thought. Everything the guy presents is awesome. I’d love to visit Dynamicland someday.

Jason Fried, DHH, Ryan Singer (Basecamp)

I’ll admit it – I’m a Basecamp fanboy. I use Basecamp to manage projects, I read Basecamp books, I listen to the Rework podcast, I quote their blog posts, I email their support staff bugs I’ve found. The leadership at Basecamp just gets it as far as running a product business is concerned.

The ‘Basecamp Bros’ also give me the courage to color outside of the lines, startup wise. I don’t seek investment capital nor prioritize growth over quality, I don’t do aggro content/email marketing, I treat my customers as human beings and I’m not afraid to cuss on a conference call or on my own fuckin’ website because of my experience using Basecamp.

Edward Tufte

ET’s works were my earliest memory of getting into information architecture and design. His books are still among the most beautiful books I’ve ever opened. There’s this little detail where the text in a Tufte book very rarely runs from one page to the other. I love little things like that.

There’s this one part of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information where he talks about a shed that was decorated to look like a giant duck, quoting ‘it is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.’

That concept is always on my mind – its what’s wrong with web design, in my opinion (we’re always constructing decoration) – and it’s what planted the seed for the idea of Soul Sites.

Matthew Butterick

Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography was a game changer for me – not just for the content, but that it represents a collection of extremely valuable knowledge, presented in a book-ish format, on the web. His website represents some of the best User Designed Experience principles I’ve seen online, like allowing users to change the typography of the site to feature his own products. ‘Why Does Typography Matter‘ is also somewhat of a guiding light for me. I love and value typography thanks to MB.

Contact

Questions? Want to work with Ginger Soul?

Send Dave an email.