Jing Theory

Jing Theory is an app grounded in Chinese metaphysics, reading your chart through six traditions at once: Hellenistic astrology, BaZi, Vedic, Human Design, Gene Keys, and astrocartography. It casts your birth data through all six at once and keeps whichever reading holds up across them as your portrait.

Little Plains partnered with founder Jing Gao to create the brand, design the full product from onboarding through daily user flows, build generative asset workflows in Flora, and deliver an agent-readable atomic kit Jing could take into coding agents like Claude Code and keep building on her own.

The name comes from Chinese medicine's Three Treasures. Jing is the essence you're born with, before anything happens to you. That fits an app built on the idea that your chart at birth is fixed and legible, and every tradition reading it is looking at the same thing from a different angle.

The logomark carries that idea forward with a circular grid, evenly divided, the way a birth chart divides the sky into houses.

The palette comes from the natural world: moonlight, celadon, jade, porcelain, rosewood, soft coral, sand. We wanted the colors to read off stone and dusk. Type is GT Ultra Median for headlines, GT Ultra for supporting weight, and Matter for the longer passages in the product. The pairing gives the brand two registers: expressive where it speaks to you and measured where it handles your chart.

The art direction pulls from East Asian ink-wash painting, the visual language the six systems come from. Because the twelve zodiac animals needed consistency across dozens of contexts, we built generative workflows in Flora and edited the output until the full set felt unified. We then packaged those workflows so Jing could keep generating new illustrations and icons on her own, extending the brand's visual language without needing us in the room every time.

Onboarding asks for only what the chart needs: your name and pronouns first, then your birthday, birth time, and location. The payoff is a single Day Master card where six systems converge into one line you recognize as true.

The main app holds four tabs. "You" holds the synthesis: one signature line with all six systems laid out underneath as sources. "Timing" reads the sky against your chart, hour by hour and year by year. "Us" extends the same reading to the people around you. "Ask Jing" puts the whole chart in conversation, backed by four named tradition guides: Wei Liang for BaZi, Priya Nair for Vedic, Marcus Obi for Human Design, and Elara Voss for Western astrology, plus an I Ching cast and a tarot draw.

Jing was building the app herself in Claude Code. That meant the brand system had to work for two audiences at once: Jing as a founder making product decisions, and the AI agent writing her code. We built an agent-readable atomic kit, a design system structured so a coding agent could apply the correct type, color, spacing, and component rules to produce screens that hold the brand. Alongside it we exported HTML prototypes of every flow, structured for agent handoff, so Jing could point her agent at the whole folder and start building.

The result is a brand system that scales through code the same way it would through a design team. As the app grew, we stayed involved to help push the art direction further and tighten the kit, so the system kept improving alongside the product.

Jing Theory is currently in private beta. The brand, product, and generative asset system were an exercise in building for two audiences at once: the person using the app and the AI agent building it.