Joinery

I spent three years building AI governance methodology: accommodation design, input inversion, voice governance, lens extraction, semantic hierarchy, prosthetic cognition. I published six whitepapers with DOIs. I built sixty working skills and agents. I wrote 196 essays documenting how it all works. Then I realized the methodology was teachable and nobody was teaching it.

Joinery is a school for creative practitioners who use AI and want to keep their voice. I built the brand, the curriculum, the platform, and the site.

The Brand System

The name comes from woodworking: joinery is how pieces connect. The methodology is about how intent connects to output across tools, contexts, and scale. The mark is a woven lattice pattern, geometric, interlocking. It reads as craft, not tech.

The type system uses Archivo for headings and Figtree for body text. I kept these separate from the Calder Dark family that runs across my personal site, Third Industries, and Journeyman. The school has a different register. It needs to feel pedagogical, structured, and warm. Archivo has the weight for authority. Figtree has the openness for readability in long course descriptions.

The site uses a golden ratio grid (12 columns, 20px gutter, 1200px max) with generous whitespace. Content-driven widths, no framework. The palette is clean: white background, warm near-black text (#2A2725), one accent color (#C45A2D) for calls to action and links. The accent is a burnt orange that comes from the same family as the petersalvato.com accent (#7a4e2d), warmer and more energetic.

The Curriculum

Fifteen courses across three tiers. Each course runs three weeks of applied practice on the student’s own real project.

Foundations tier: The entry point. Foundations teaches the core methodology: task decomposition, input inversion, voice governance. Design Thinking and Writing extend the foundation into specific domains.

Advanced tier: Five courses that go deeper into individual practices. Input Inversion, Voice Governance, Lens Extraction, Semantic Hierarchy, and Coordinator Building. Each one has a published whitepaper behind it.

Specialist tracks: Seven tracks tailored to specific practitioners. Brand Designer, Copywriter, Creative Director, Educator, Fiction Writer, Nonfiction Writer, and a Shopify Brand Governance course built directly from the Aiden Jae work.

The Shopify course exists because of a real engagement. I built a complete brand system for a jewelry company (Aiden Jae), including the Shopify platform, and the process produced a repeatable curriculum. The course teaches what I did, step by step, on the student’s own store.

The Student Experience

Every course works on the student’s own real project. No fictional examples, no toy problems. A brand designer takes the Shopify Brand Governance course and works on their client’s actual store. A fiction writer takes Voice Governance and builds a protocol for their actual manuscript. The methodology applies to whatever they brought in.

The student finishes Foundations with three deliverables they can use immediately: a decomposed task architecture for their AI workflow, an input inversion protocol that restructures how they brief the tools, and a voice governance system that holds their voice across sessions and tools. Those are working artifacts, not certificates.

Foundations is priced at $299 for self-paced access. The market reference: Kirby Ferguson’s Infinite Remix cohort charges $1,250-1,750 for a five-week live course on a similar thesis (creativity as remix, AI as creative tool). The pricing has room to grow, particularly if a live cohort tier is added.

The Platform

The course delivery runs on Flask with a lesson-by-lesson interface. Stripe handles enrollment payments. Each lesson builds on the previous one with applied exercises on the student’s own project. The platform is minimal by design: the content is the experience, not the interface.

The Consulting Bridge

The school creates a natural consulting pipeline. A client’s team takes the Voice Governance course and learns to maintain brand coherence when using AI tools. The client who needs more than training hires me for the governance build directly. The school teaches the methodology. The consulting applies it. The same work, two price points, two relationships.

This is the offer I am building with a business consultant (Harrison Benjamin) whose clients are consumer brands using AI agents for operations. He builds the automation. I build the creative governance layer and train the client’s team to maintain it. The school courses are the training component of that partnership.

The Research Layer

Every methodology taught in the courses is backed by published research. Six whitepapers on Zenodo with DOIs:

• Accommodation Design
• Input Inversion
• Voice Governance
• Lens Extraction
• Semantic Hierarchy (Semantic Flattening and the Case for Human-Marked Importance in AI Memory)
• Prosthetic Cognition

The papers formalize what the courses teach. A student finishes Foundations with a working voice protocol, a decomposed task architecture, and applied input inversion on their own project. If they want the theory underneath, the papers are public and cited.

The Funnel

The market for AI creative governance is crowded at the bottom (dozens of “make ChatGPT sound like you” hack videos) and empty at the top. Nobody is teaching voice as a durable system, ongoing governance, drift detection, or practitioner-grade methodology. The gap I am filling: how to build a voice system that holds across tools, contexts, and scale. The pain point is real. “It doesn’t sound like me” is what people search for. The answer is structural, not behavioral.

joineryschool.com