This section covers the company, its values, its voice, the name, and the mark.
NASA's composite of the whole planet. The company sells to every part of it, so the brand section starts at that scale.
One decree carved in three scripts so every reader could read it. General Translation does the same for software: one source text, every language.
Visual references
The primary influence is International Style typography and grids, with Art Deco as a secondary influence. The visual vocabulary is Swiss grids, blueprints, and rectangular forms with no rounded corners. Water and the ocean are a recurring theme. The only texture is an ordered dither.
Müller-Brockmann, 1955
Aicher, Munich 1972
Vignelli map, 1972
Split-flap board
NOAA chart
Rosetta Stone
Chrysler Building
Whole Earth Catalog
Transit signage
Braun ET66, Dieter Rams
Olympic stamp, 1964The companies referenced for craft are Vercel, Resend, Stripe Press, Linear, and Cursor. The photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are shown in grayscale.
The name
The name General Translation was chosen for three reasons, in priority order.
The first is ambition. As with General Motors or General Electric, the name signals the intent to be the leading company in the category.
The second is generality. General AI models understand context and follow instructions better than specialized translation models.
The third is distinction. Most other localization companies have names beginning with L.
This section covers color, type, scripts, lines, diagrams, dither, illustration, and motion.
A sixteenth-century practice sheet where the letterforms are the whole design. The design system makes the same choice: type carries the identity.
This section covers the production site page by page, its measurements, and its shaders.
The production site
The site shown is the production build in September 2026. generaltranslation.com was rebuilt page by page on one layout system: a single ruled column, hairline seams between sections, registration crosses at junctions, and one display face at one weight. The Dossier direction on prototemplate.com was the reference, and the production codebase set the constraints.
Dark mode
Dark mode is a token remap. Background tokens map to black, text tokens map to white, and hairline opacity increases so a 1px seam stays visible between two black surfaces. Both captures below are fixed files and do not follow the deck theme.
Pricing and enterprise
Contact and report card
A working light in a storm, built to be read at a distance in any weather. The site is held to the same standard, in light and in dark.
Details
Each crop is cut from the same pixel region of the light and the dark capture and follows the deck theme. No text is smaller than it is on the site.
Three close-ups
These three crops are shown at 1.4 times their size on a 1440px screen. The hairline under the header, the rail and the arms of the cross are 1px on the site, and at this size each line is visible on its own.
The install panel is from the docs. Its plate is light in light mode and near-black in dark mode, and the deck's own code panel rule does not apply to it.
The horizon field
The careers page hero is the horizon field, a WebGL gravitational-lensing shader. Thirty locale names orbit it once every 130 seconds, and it fades in from blur over 0.9 seconds. A static fallback disc renders if WebGL is unavailable or the shader has not loaded after 2.5 seconds, and reduced motion renders one frame. The ring keeps its colors in both themes. The prototemplate version exposes lens, dither, and redshift as toggles.
This section covers the docs: 393 pages in eight sections served in eight locales, the routing that sends a mistyped URL to the nearest page, and the markdown twins published for agents.
The docs
The docs have 393 pages in eight sections and are served in eight locales from one English source. The palette is neutral gray with hairlines instead of shadows and one accent color for the active sidebar row and the table-of-contents indicator. Sidebar indentation is drawn as vertical rails, and the controls sit in one floating toolbar.
The palette follows Vercel's Geist grays. The sidebar rails use Fumadocs' own table-of-contents indicator technique, related pages follow the Next.js docs convention, and the markdown versions follow llmstxt.org.
The full dictionary is printed small enough to need a magnifier, and it is still complete. The docs are built in the same order: the set is complete before it is made compact.
This section covers the blog, its covers, the content rules, and the brand assets outside the site.
Blog index
The index uses a split-flap display: two tickers cycle the word for news through fifteen languages above and below the headline. The changelog is a horizontal strip of release cards. Below the changelog, posts are listed in a card grid and filtered by four categories: Engineering, Craft, Community, and News.
Generated covers
Posts without a cover image get a generated one: a keyword from the title (SEO, Next.js, i18n, React) or the package name of a release, rendered through a ten-tier Bayer dither ramp on a 400 by 225 canvas and rotated by an angle derived from the slug. Two posts have designed covers, both dithered compositions with a lockup. The rest use generated type covers.
A page of the Prashna Upanishad, copied by hand so the text could travel. The company's writing exists to travel the same way, between scripts and readers.
Designed covers
Designed covers and the reel use one GPU material from Glyphfield, gem smoke, driven by two color uniforms: a dark base and a brand color. Partner covers change only the brand color and the lockup, so the partner color is each page's single accent.
Blog content
The blog relaunched in August 2026 with an open-source grant program: $15,000 across fifteen developers, each with platform credits, and a profile of each grantee to follow. The first profile is Fuma Nama, the author of Fumadocs, which the docs run on.
Brand assets outside the site
The X banner uses the sign-in page's dithered globe and glyph field next to the customer logo grid. The open-source announcement reel cuts between twelve shader materials at 0.2 seconds each and ends on the grant amount. Both were produced with Prototemplate and Glyphfield. The social share card still uses pure black (#000000) and weight 800, outside the current rules, and has not been updated yet.
This section covers the developer experience: source code as the source of truth and translation as a build step.
The first global network, drawn as the routes that carried messages between continents. Developer experience is the route a string takes from source code to every locale.
This section covers prototemplate.com, the design lab and knowledge base, and glyphfield.com, the tooling behind it.
Prototemplate
Prototemplate is the General Translation knowledge base at prototemplate.com. It serves the brand book, the brand directives, the repository documents, the agent skills, the mark explorations, the design lab and the archive as live pages in one viewer; every direction is a built page, and there are no mockups.
Skills and marks
Both pages run in the same viewer and read pure data files. The skills page is built from the frontmatter of every published SKILL.md; the marks page reads nine SVG files and their construction overlays. Both crops follow the deck theme.
The shell in use
Three states of the gallery route at 1440 pixels, each cut from a capture at two times device scale to the region that carries it. Every crop follows the deck theme.
The line law in chrome
Every rule the shell draws is 1px, drawn once, in one of three roles, and the weights carry meaning. Where two components touch, one of them owns the seam and draws it.
Compare and the presenter
Two review tools sit beside the knowledge base. Compare puts two directions side by side; the presenter walks through the redesign with every prototype live.
The Dossier
The Dossier is the completed direction and the reference for the identity in application. Its home page lists the supported frameworks inside the hero terminal. Its enterprise page numbers each compliance control and sets the plan terms and sign-on controls as ruled tables.
Directions
Seventeen directions are registered in one file, src/lib/directions.ts: thirteen explorations, three site concepts and the shipped site. The gallery, the presenter, compare and the sitemap all read that list.
Toolchain is the single source of truth for the shared vocabulary. The forks import its sections and diagrams and re-skin them by rescoping one root class. The three marked thumbnails are the site concepts; Dossier is the reference, and every thumbnail follows the deck theme. The shipped site, the seventeenth direction, has no thumbnail here. It is rebuilt page for page at /d/production, and the Website section shows it.
Toolchain
Chroma Flow
Dither Field
Aurora Paper
Glyph Rain
Prism Light
Lens Gate
Paper Foundry
Terminus Board
Wide Rule
Event Horizon
Hourglass
Singularity
Dossier
Orbit
Signal
Hokusai's print came from carved blocks, so the same image could be pulled again without change. Prototemplate and Glyphfield hold the brand's reusable parts.
The archive
Eleven versions were retired from review on July 30, 2026. When their code left the tree, each was kept as a capture at its own address with the route as it was, its source and date, and the commit that last held the code, so any of them can be restored.
Shared engines
Twelve engines run live on the docs page under the readme, each on a plate with the call that mounts it. Every engine mounts on first view, runs on screen, pauses off screen, and renders one frame under reduced motion. The plates below are cut from the page at two times device scale. Four are cropped to the engine itself.
Horizon fieldA WebGL lens shader takes 21 parameters.
Glyph fieldGlyphs from eight scripts form one word.
Ink fieldGlyphs rise through the band margins.
Prismatic fieldA spectral wash runs behind the bands.
DitherA CPU Bayer pass draws one pixel per cell.
Studio fieldTen Bayer presets share one GL context.
IsoA 30 degree projection draws every solid.
Doubled lineOne path is stroked twice into two threads.
Edge globeThe globe shows five PoPs and one route.
Locale tagA 15 by 11 flag prints beside the code.
Reveal seamA slider writes one CSS variable.
Glyph reassemblerOne sentence reforms in the next locale.The build log
The readme on /docs ends with the build log, six sections in reading order. Each engine runs on a plate under its heading, above its source path and the snippet that mounts it.
Glyphfield
Glyphfield is an open-source, local-first brand studio at glyphfield.com, released under the MIT license. One identity supplies the marks, colors, type, voice and defaults to fifteen tools in five categories and to a shared library of 134 live materials. General Translation is one of nine built-in identities, and the two sites share the Bayer dither engines. Projects stay in the browser, and the generation API keeps nothing.
Fifteen tools
Books and templates
Two of the fifteen tools produce finished documents from the identity alone. Both are shown here on the starter identity, and both follow the studio's own light and dark themes.
134 live materials
The shader library is one quality-sorted catalog shared by the Design Lab and the animation tool. Brand colors seed every material; a new composition opens on gem smoke, the material behind the blog covers and the reel. The six tiles are live renders from the library.
This section covers what has shipped, what is open, the identity project, the fixed points, and the success criteria.
Current status
Each surface is listed with its state on September 9, 2026. Where fixes are open, the redesign is live on that surface and the open items are named.
Sitegeneraltranslation.comFixes openHome, pricing, enterprise, careers and contact run the redesign. The enterprise rebuild, the blue consolidation and the CTA ring fix are open.Docs/docs, 393 pages in eight localesFixes openThe redesign merged September 3 and nearest-page routing September 8. The locale guard, per-locale markdown and flag selectors are open.Blog/blog, posts and the changelogLiveThe index with its two tickers, the changelog strip and the post pages run the redesign. Designed covers use the gem smoke material.
Librariesgithub.com/generaltranslation/gtLivegt, gt-next, gt-react, gt-vue, gt-node and gt-python ship under names that are fixed points. The CLI is the gt package.
Dashboarddash.generaltranslation.comFixes openThe sign-in page carries the mark, the dithered globe and the glyph field. Fixes to the dashboard interface are open.
Brandprototemplate.com/brandIn progressThe identity project runs September 1 to November 27. Its deliverables become design tokens and assets in Prototemplate and on the site.
An engraved compass rose from a 1748 chart, the instrument for setting a course. This section lists what has shipped, what is open, and the two points that do not change.
Success criteria
Visitors perceive quality before reading any copy, and all five tests pass. Two tests run against the current system today and are shown below.
generaltranslation.com, prototemplate.com, glyphfield.com