The living brand guidelines for General Translation, and the design lab that produced them: sixteen art directions and three full sites built as live pages (never mockups), plus the tooling that judges them. The Dossier (/d/singularity-dossier) is the completed direction — the canonical statement of the identity in application. The other two sites, Signal and Orbit, are showcases of the previous generation: each keeps its own hero and carries the sections the Dossier retired. The index (/) is the working file: the anatomy wall (the flagship cut into section tiles, light and dark, desktop and mobile) and the capabilities ledger (what the system can do, each entry pointing at where it runs live). /compare sweeps two directions against each other in synced same-origin frames; /brand is the identity book; /present walks the deck; /docs serves the written canon and, right below this tour, the whole build log — the laws, the auditors, and every library running live.
the identity canon: the name, the idea, the character and voice, the mark, color, type, language as material — and the Dossier as the completed reference
the visual canon: the four-color system, the line law, rails/grounds/seams, the doubled line, iso, the 1-bit language, moving type, motion discipline, the mobile type ladder, the svh/dvh law, the two read lines
finished artwork made with the system: the Open Source announcement reel and the X banner, shown live in /brand
Agent sessions: the same material is wired as skills under .agents/skills/gt-redesign (umbrella) and the focused redesign-* skills.
The one-paragraph tour
Every page runs on the laws: hairlines drawn exactly once (scripts/lint-lines.mjs fails the round otherwise), four absolute colors plus one spectral accent per page, dark mode as a pure token remap, and one mobile type ladder (DESIGN.md §12). src/app/d/toolchain is the single source of truth the fork directions import and re-skin by root-class rescoping; src/lib holds the visual engines; src/components/shared holds the instruments. src/lib/directions.ts registers every direction — the index, presenter, and sitemap all follow it. The anatomy wall's tiles come from docs/harness/gallery-shoot.mjs under deterministic names (ARCHITECTURE.md, "The gallery pipeline") — a missing tile just drops from the wall.
The system under the system
Sixteen directions and three full sites is the visible output. Underneath them is the part I actually spent the time on: a set of laws about lines and color, the tooling that enforces those laws mechanically, and a family of visual engines built as standalone libraries. What follows is the inventory — with the diagrams, the invocations, and the engines themselves running live.
The line law, and the auditors that hold it
Every direction runs on one typographic rule: structure comes from hairlines, and every line is drawn exactly once. That is easy to say and impossible to maintain by eye, so the repo lints its own pixels. The line auditor loads every page in a real browser — both themes, two widths — reconstructs every rendered line from computed styles (borders, outlines, spread shadows, thin filled boxes, pseudo rails clamped to their clipping ancestors, and the 1px ground reveals framed rows use as seams), then fails the round on four classes of defect:
Doubled lines — two parallel strokes from different owners within 4px of each other, including coincident strokes that composite darker than either.
Missing seams — section and row junctions that no rule closes.
Self-stacks — a translucent border over the element’s own translucent background, the same line drawn twice by one element.
Invisible seams — rules that exist geometrically but sit within a few RGB steps of the surface they cross.
Two cells and a seam, as the auditor reconstructs them. It rebuilds every rendered line from computed styles — borders, outlines, spread shadows, thin filled boxes, pseudo rails, 1px ground reveals — then fails the round on any of the four classes.
One command audits a page; a finding names the two owners, the gap between their strokes, and the span over which they run in parallel. The round below is staged — this page audits clean in both themes — but the shape is the auditor’s own:
Deliberate devices — the brand’s doubled threads, marquee rails, terminal frames — live on a small allow list, so the auditor stays strict everywhere else. Two more linters ride along: a shell linter that bans raw color literals in the component layer (every stroke goes through the hairline tokens), and a practices ratchet that counts button types, bare effects, any-types, raw hex in markup and !important in CSS, and refuses any commit that adds to the count.
Rails, grounds, and seams
The page’s spine is a ruled column with doubled rails — an outer hairline pair running the full height, the inner pair drawn once by the column’s own edges. What looks like a simple frame is an ownership system:
Exactly one thing draws the page rails for any section — a rail wrapper, or the section’s own full-bleed pair. Never both.
The row owns every structural line; cells never draw borders that parallel a row seam.
Framed rows expose the ground through a 1px padding reveal instead of drawing a border — the ground is the seam.
Translucent fills never extend under translucent borders: backgrounds clip to the padding box, everywhere.
One owner per line. The wrapper draws the doubled rails for the whole page; each row owns its seams and its close; a framed cell exposes the ground through a 1px padding reveal instead of drawing a border of its own. Where the row meets the rails the cells sit flush — a reveal never runs beside a line that already exists — and the plus marks on the nav’s crossings are border crosses, the one ornament a junction is allowed.
The overlap is the named antipattern all of this exists to kill: two owners each drawing a real line along the same edge, compositing into one band darker and thicker than any line the system allows. This page carried one — the diagram above used to run the row’s 1px ground reveal against the inner rail, so the reveal and the rail hairline stacked into a literal doubled border wherever the framed cells met the column. The fix is now drawn into the figure: where a row meets a line that already exists, the cell sits flush and that side’s reveal is dropped. A reveal never runs beside a rail; a border never runs beside a seam.
Two devices keep the law workable at junctions. Between sections, the diagonal-hatch spacer owns the boundary once — one hairline under a 45° hatch band, the strip you see between every part of this page — so two closes never argue over the same edge. And where two hairlines must legitimately cross, a border cross can be added: a small plus seated exactly on the intersection, the way a printer’s registration mark declares a crossing deliberate. The diagram wears two, where the nav’s close meets the rails.
The ownership system is not a convention to remember — it is componentized, so the wrong line is impossible to draw. A rails wrapper renders the page pair; the row renders one hair-colored ground under 1px gaps; cells have no border props at all:
src/components/shell/Bento.tsx — the primitives in use
import { BentoCell, BentoRow, Rails } from '@/components/shell/Bento';
<section className='relative'>
{/* the wrapper draws the page rails — once */}
<Rails />
{/* the row owns the seams: gap-px cells over the one hair ground */}
<BentoRow cols='7fr 5fr'>
<BentoCell title='Ship in every language' sub='One pipeline'>
<LocaleLedger />
</BentoCell>
<BentoCell framed={false} cell='is-terminal'>
<Terminal />
</BentoCell>
</BentoRow>
</section>
Corners, spacers, and the second surface
The corner notches on hero cards are not drawn — they are the ground showing through, so a corner can never disagree with the seam that meets it. Sections separate with hatch spacer bands (the diagonal you see between every part of this page) rather than empty margin, and light diagrams sit on exactly one sanctioned second surface, mirroring the ink and raised-ink pair that dark mode runs on. The four-color palette — ink, raised ink, titanium, paper — allows one bright white, one spectral accent per page, and earns depth with lines and material instead of shadows.
the hatch spacerrepeating-linear-gradient(-45deg · 6px / 7px)
the four-color system
ink#070707
raised ink#101010
titanium#8a8f98
paper#ffffff
The corner is never drawn — the card’s 12px radius lets the ground fill the notch, so a corner cannot disagree with the seam that meets it. The hatch strip is the exact recipe of the dividers on this page, and the four colors are the whole structural palette.
The libraries
The signature visuals are not page code, and neither are the instruments around them. Each entry below is root-agnostic with a real contract — options in and a handle out, or one component with one prop surface — living in its own module. Once they are perfected they will be open-sourced on GitHub as individual libraries. Every plate is the real thing, mounted the way a consumer mounts it: engines are created when the plate first scrolls near and paused by their own observers when it leaves, a single still under reduced motion; the drawings are the actual geometry modules; the seam is the actual slider.
horizon-field the singularity visual
The lensing black hole: a photon ring, wrapped accretion arcs, and the page’s own ruled lines bending into the mass — one WebGL fragment shader on one quad. Twenty-one tunable parameters (geometry, doppler, chroma, exposure, breathing), a full runtime handle (setParams, pause, resume, renderStatic, destroy), and GLSL kept comment-free by design so the shipped source stays a fraction of the page it lights.
createHorizonField()
src/lib/horizon-field.ts
import { createHorizonField } from '@/lib/horizon-field';
const field = createHorizonField(canvas, {
speed: 0.5,
params: { ink: [1, 1, 1], exposure: 2.6 },
});
/* the shader draws nothing until it is given a geometry */
const fit = () => {
field?.setParams({
center: [canvas.clientWidth / 2, canvas.clientHeight / 2],
radius: Math.min(canvas.clientWidth, canvas.clientHeight) * 0.32,
});
};
fit();
new ResizeObserver(fit).observe(canvas);
/* handle: setParams · pause · resume · renderStatic · destroy */
glyph-field the glyph rain visual
A canvas-2D particle field of 1,280 glyphs from eight writing systems that condenses into the word "language" in script after script. One preallocated typed-array pool, a 1-bit Bayer-dithered atlas, and morphs that conserve matter: the outgoing word’s dust is the next word’s material, and nothing ever spawns mid-air or vanishes mid-flight. The dossier home hardened it into a real library: a drift option runs the rain down or up on the same negative-safe wrap math (its closing band rises), per-sprite ink bounds cut the blitted area several-fold, depth alpha is quantized so the loop touches globalAlpha a handful of times per pass instead of per glyph, the field is host-aspect-true — homes live in unit coordinates and re-lay onto the live box every resize, so nothing about it is square — and a frame-time governor watches the real cadence: a wide viewport on weak silicon steps down the same quality ladder the phone cut uses (lean device-pixel cap, then the lean pool), down only, with pool cuts waiting for idle rain.
createGlyphField()
src/lib/glyph-field.ts
import { createGlyphField } from '@/lib/glyph-field';
const field = createGlyphField({
canvas,
drift: 'rise', // the library's fall, or a rising field — same wrap math
copy: 'none', // 'auto' infers the copy fold; 'none' is a standalone plate
displayFamily: getComputedStyle(canvas).fontFamily,
monoFamily: getComputedStyle(canvas).getPropertyValue('--pt-mono'),
onScript: (index) => setActive(index),
});
/* the whole teardown — observers, loop, theme watcher */
field?.destroy();
ink-field the band margins’ rising rain
The closing band’s material as its own engine: the glyph-field’s eight-script inventory rising off the ink in the same set 34px columns, with a content clearing measured off the live DOM box so glyphs own only the margins. The band mounts run it gated: parked entirely below the tc narrow cut, the header’s full-width strip kept clear so glyphs own only the sides and the foot, a 1.5x device-pixel ceiling and a 30fps cap for the slow drift, and the frame-time governor underneath. It inherited every one of the hero’s flicker lessons — solid tiers on a tier-batched alpha ramp (dither never rides moving glyphs), integer-snapped device-px blits, hysteresis on the clearing rim — and on this plate it plays: glyphs shiver as the pointer nears, and a click blows the nearest one up, its shockwave shoving the column neighbors before the field heals.
createInkField()
src/app/d/glyph-rain/sections/band/inkField.ts
import { createInkField } from '@/app/d/glyph-rain/sections/band/inkField';
const field = createInkField({
canvas,
clearEl: contentBox, // the field keeps clear of this box, measured live
clearing: 'none', // — or flood the whole canvas (this plate)
interactive: true, // pointer wobble + click bursts; bands never set it
displayFamily: getComputedStyle(canvas).fontFamily,
});
field?.destroy();
prismatic-field the chroma wash
The spectral light behind every dark terminal and band — a flowing wide-gamut wash with presets, speed and exposure control, masked so the light owns the edges and the content owns the dark center.
<PrismaticField />
src/components/shared/PrismaticField.tsx
import PrismaticField from '@/components/shared/PrismaticField';
<PrismaticField
preset='2'
speed={0.5}
params={{ exposureScale: 4200 }}
className='plate-field'
/>
/* presets: '1' wide burst · '2' arc over a dark core.
exposureScale is the dimmer — raise it under content. */
dither the 1-bit Bayer renderer
Any continuous field fn(u, v, t) → 0..1, rendered as pure 1-bit ordered dither: each cell compares the field against the 8×8 Bayer matrix — an exact permutation of 0..63, so a flat field lights exactly k pixels per tile and the ramp has 65 tonally linear levels. It draws one device pixel per cell into a small buffer and lets CSS upscale it pixelated, writes every frame through one reused Uint32 view, and ships field factories — radial bursts, a lit globe, streak bands, ramps, a true text SDF — plus combinators to multiply, max and mix them. The loop caps at 30fps, pauses offscreen and on hidden tabs, and renders exactly one still under reduced motion.
The GPU sibling of the CPU renderer above — the house Bayer looks themselves, codified. Ten variants live in one module as fragment shaders on a single session-singleton WebGL context, exported as the BAYER_PRESETS roster: slot 01 is the founder’s first-survey pick untouched, and the rest move along real axes — matrix order (2×2, 4×4, 8×8), cell scale from poster to near-grain, the tone field under the matrix (flow, contours, flank radials, sweeps, interference, breath), motion, and palette balance from ink-dominant to the one white-hot variant. Anything that shows or switches the family maps over that one list — the hero review rig and this plate included. Switching is a remount: programs compile lazily and cache for the session, destroy() keeps the shared context, so cycling never grows the context count.
<StudioField preset={…} />
src/lib/studio-field.ts
import StudioField from '@/components/shared/StudioField';
import { BAYER_DEFAULT_ID, BAYER_PRESETS } from '@/lib/studio-field';
const [id, setId] = useState(BAYER_DEFAULT_ID);
const active = BAYER_PRESETS.find((v) => v.id === id);
/* switching is a remount: key the stage, and the outgoing field's
destroy() runs before the incoming one draws — one shared GL
context, one program per preset cached for the session */
<StudioField key={active.id} preset={active.preset} className='plate-field' />
{BAYER_PRESETS.map((v) => (
<button data-on={v.id === id} key={v.id} onClick={() => setId(v.id)}>
<i>{v.id}</i> <span>{v.name}</span>
</button>
))}
iso the isometric drawing kit
Every isometric illustration in the family goes through one 30° axonometric map — project(x, y, z) seats the camera at (+,+,+), so exactly three faces of any solid are visible, always lit in the same order from the upper left. A solid is extruded by recipe: an opaque hull from the rounded silhouette occludes whatever sits below, face fills shade it, then the hairlines — rim, top contour, and the interior front edges the silhouette does not already draw. Boxes are no longer the whole kit: IsoPrism extrudes any convex plan polygon with the same visibility and three-tone law, plane(z) is the exported matrix that seats whole flat drawings — glyph strokes, masked brand marks — into any surface, markPath() lays rounded bars in a face, and DitheredMark renders a logo as masked ink with the Bayer-quantized shimmer the tower’s capstone wears. Thickness runs about four percent of footprint, one corner radius serves the whole family, and every drawing spends its accent on exactly one element.
The brand’s connector is one SVG path stroked twice: a full-gauge ink stroke underneath and a narrower surface-colored core on top, carving the ink into two parallel hairline threads at a constant gap along any curve. Because both strokes share one geometry the gap cannot drift on a bend, and non-scaling-stroke holds the gauge in screen pixels even under a stretched viewBox. Now a component: DoubledLine takes the center path, the carving surface, the gauges, and a pulse slot — and it two-tones the pair, one white thread and one gray, by clipping the white copy to a half-plane closed along the same geometry, so the split seam hides inside the carve on every bend (offset clones collapse on curves; concentric restrokes can only make symmetric rings). Draw a later one over an earlier one and the junction re-carves itself into one clean pair: merges cost zero parallel-curve math. This is also the one sanctioned double — one owner, one path, stroked twice; the auditor’s allow list holds it by name.
<DoubledLine />
src/components/shared/diagrams/DoubledLine.tsx
import DoubledLine from '@/components/shared/diagrams/DoubledLine';
const TRUNK = 'M330 120 L680 120';
/* the split region: the SAME center path, closed off the top edge —
the clip boundary is the line itself, hidden inside the carve */
const SPLIT = TRUNK + ' L680 -20 L330 -20 Z';
<svg viewBox='0 0 720 240' aria-hidden='true'>
<DoubledLine
d={TRUNK}
core='var(--color-ink)' /* the surface that carves */
ink='rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.88)' /* the white thread */
inkB='rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.42)' /* the gray thread */
splitD={SPLIT}
gauge={1}
gap={2}
>
{/* the pulse slot — between threads and core, carved to two
accent hairlines by the same core */}
<path className='pulse' d={PULSE} />
</DoubledLine>
</svg>
edge-globe the delivery drawing
The translation CDN as an orthographic globe, drawn entirely in ink: front graticule arcs at the family’s regular weight, far arcs as dashed hairlines — depth said once, with ink, no fills and no shading. Five points of presence stand on graticule intersections with corner-routed leaders that never cross; one bowed great-circle route from the user to the answering PoP is the drawing’s single accent, and one GSAP loop rides it — request dot out, arrival ring, payload chip back. Behind it the dossier home seats a static Bayer atmosphere: four non-overlapping annuli filled with nested coverage tiers of the ordered matrix on one shared grid, so crossing a ring boundary only ever turns dots off and no cell is painted twice.
<EdgeGlobe />
src/app/d/toolchain/diagrams/EdgeGlobe.tsx
import EdgeGlobe from '@/app/d/toolchain/diagrams/EdgeGlobe';
/* the dossier mount: a static Bayer atmosphere hugs the limb — four
annuli of nested coverage tiers on one shared grid, so crossing a
ring boundary only turns dots off and no cell is painted twice */
<div className='v0-glob-stage'>
<GlobeAtmosphere />
<EdgeGlobe title='Five PoPs, one request served 12 ms away' />
</div>
locale-tag the locale pill
Every bare locale code on every page renders through one component: flag first — a fixed 15×11 print from an SVG flag pack, corners barely eased, never a shadow — then the code in the host surface’s own mono, seated on the text baseline with the flag centered against it. The component carries no box of its own; hosts supply the chip — the hairline pill on light surfaces, the translucent-bordered terminal pill on dark — so the same tag drops into ledgers, capability marquees, diagram key columns and the infinite locale belt. Explicit region subtags fly their own flag (en-GB, ar-EG), bases resolve through a twenty-language map, and an unknown locale degrades to a flagless code rather than a wrong flag.
en-GBesjaar-EGkozh-Hanthipt
<LocaleTag code='…' />
src/app/d/toolchain/components/LocaleTag.tsx
import LocaleTag from '@/app/d/toolchain/components/LocaleTag';
// bare flag+code chip in a code→output ledger row
<div className='tcb-out-row'>
<span><LocaleTag code='es' /></span>
<b lang='es'>¡Hola, mundo!</b>
</div>
// bordered transcript pill in the hero terminal's ✓-row —
// the host supplies the box, the tag only fills it
<LocaleTag code={loc} className='tc-termloc' />
reveal-seam the slide-to-reveal instrument
A hundred-line dependency-free slider that drags one CSS custom property, --seam-cut, onto a host box; the top layer clips to it, so the underlayer is revealed in place and content never travels a pixel with the handle. State lives in the CSS var rather than React state — drags cause zero re-renders, GSAP intros and cinema beat scrubs drive the same dial by writing the var directly, and the keyboard path re-reads the live computed value so every writer stays in agreement. The handle is the brand’s doubled line in the dossier refit — two solid threads at the house gap, the run between them filled with the payload’s own ink, bridged by a rectangular grip tab on a 64px hitbox — with a full slider role, arrow-key nudges, and a statically parked cut under reduced motion.
rendered ui
Empieza en minutos. Publica en cada idioma.
public/_gt/es.json
{
"hero.title": "Empieza en minutos.",
"hero.body": "Publica en cada idioma."
}
<RevealSeam />
src/app/d/toolchain/sections/RevealSeam.tsx
import RevealSeam from '@/app/d/toolchain/sections/RevealSeam';
<div className='tct-app' ref={app} style={{ '--seam-cut': '70%' }}>
<div className='tct-app-main'>{/* rendered UI, full width */}</div>
<div className='tct-payload' aria-hidden>
{/* clip-path: inset(0 0 0 var(--seam-cut)) — revealed in place */}
<PayloadJson loc={ploc} />
</div>
<RevealSeam
boxRef={app}
ariaLabel='Reveal the served translation file'
onInteract={() => endTour()}
/>
</div>
glyph-reassembler the sentence-rewriting morph
Now a component: EverySentence owns the dossier hero’s headline engine. One shaped sentence morphs between locales by dissolving into 440 canvas-drawn glyph motes seated on the outgoing text’s own sampled ink, dispersing into a cloud, then reassembling: every glyph flies to exactly one point sampled on a brick lattice and the real text node prints through the settled swarm behind a hard clip front that absorbs each glyph as it passes, mirrored for RTL. It never runs on a timer — the host owns the one clock through a ref handle’s setLocale. Requests debounce a quarter second; one landing mid-dissolve retargets the form boundary, one landing mid-form kills the timeline and re-dissolves, and a same-text locale change retags lang and dir only. Width follows the moving-type law: one shaped probe measure per word, cached, device-pixel snapped, tweened once per cycle. The dossier hero drives it from the locale belt; the plate below drives the same handle from a plain interval.
<EverySentence />
src/components/shared/EverySentence.tsx
import EverySentence, {
type EverySentenceHandle,
} from '@/components/shared/EverySentence';
/* the host owns the one clock — the component never runs a timer.
setLocale(loc) is the only intake: debounced a quarter second,
mid-dissolve retargets the form boundary, mid-form kills the
timeline and re-dissolves, same text with a new lang retags only. */
const every = useRef<EverySentenceHandle>(null);
<h1><span>
<EverySentence ref={every} words={WORDS} initial='en' />
</span></h1>
{/* the dossier hero: the locale belt is the clock */}
<TranslateWindow onLocaleChange={(loc) => every.current?.setLocale(loc)} />
locale-belt the marquee that drives the page
The translate window’s strip zone is an infinite conveyor of locale chips, and the belt is the demo’s clock, not its decoration: the track carries the fifteen-locale roster twice and its position wraps at one run’s width — the house marquee, ticker-driven so the wrap and the centre logic share one clock — and whichever chip crosses the zone’s centre becomes the active locale, so the rendered page and the payload’s translated leaves retype from the belt’s own output, never a timer’s. Each chip owns the centre for six seconds; hovering pauses the belt, any manual interaction holds it until a quiet spell passes, and a pinned inspector or the Terminal face freezes it outright. Clicking a chip slides the belt the short way round — jumping the position by exactly one run is frame-identical, so the recentre picks the least-travel pairing that stays on the doubled track — with crossings suppressed while it travels, so only the picked locale fires. The window carries one additive vent, onLocaleChange, for a host that wants to run on the belt’s clock (the dossier hero’s morphing headline does); passed nothing, nothing changes. Reduced motion parks the belt with es centred, and clicks recentre instantly.
src/app/d/_v0/TranslateWindow.tsx
import TranslateWindow from '@/app/d/_v0/TranslateWindow';
/* the belt is the window's clock: the track carries the roster twice,
wraps at one run's width, and whichever chip crosses the strip
zone's centre fires the rewrite — never a timer */
<TranslateWindow onLocaleChange={(loc) => every.current?.setLocale(loc)} />
/* pacing: BELT_DWELL seconds a chip; any interaction holds the belt
(BELT_IDLE of quiet before it resumes); a pinned inspector or the
Terminal face freezes it outright */
nameplate-take the landing hero’s morph
The nameplate as a working type-specimen sheet: prototype in serif off the destination line’s upper left, template in grotesk off its lower right, the destination between them as empty outlined text, and every word held by a crop frame — four border-touching rules that move with their word. The take is physical: type falls out and the serif frame’s right rule slides in to re-hug the shorter word; both words then travel inward, frames riding along, until they park inside the outline — and the parked words ARE the nameplate, lowercase, so nothing ever crossfades. Every travel delta is measured from live rects, so the module never encodes where the sources sit; fonts are awaited before anything is measured, a resize rebuilds the sheet, and reduced motion holds the settled nameplate rather than replaying the take.
src/app/PrototemplateHero.tsx
import PrototemplateHero from '@/app/PrototemplateHero';
/* the take is physical: 'type' falls out, the serif frame's right
rule re-hugs the shorter word, both words travel to the outline
and PARK — the parked words ARE the nameplate, lowercase, so
nothing ever crossfades */
<PrototemplateHero />
/* travel deltas are measured from live rects — the module never
encodes where the sources sit; fonts are awaited before measuring,
resize rebuilds, reduced motion holds the settled sheet */
stack-story the scroll-scrubbed stage
The stack story’s scroll engine, and the two laws that keep a pinned read honest. One scrubbed dial spans the whole read, and a piecewise time map — measured lock-ins in, beat end-times out — converts scroll into story time, so every layer seats exactly as its beat’s copy reaches the read line whatever the beats’ real heights are. A lock-in is the copy block’s centre taking the 55% read line, measured from flow geometry (the finale is sticky, so its own rect would report the stuck pose), and the whole map re-anchors on every refresh. Between scroll and paint sits the stage’s damper: the trigger only moves a target, and one gsap.ticker lerp chases it, calling apply() once per frame — taps, cap wires, typing and rail all ride one damped clock, the stage’s equivalent of scrub: 0.35. The ticker detaches when settled, parking dead on target so no residue leaks into the beat math, and re-attaches on new input, so a resting stage burns nothing.
src/app/d/_v0/sections/FullStack.tsx
/* one dial spans the read; a piecewise map (measured lock-ins in,
beat end-times out) converts it to story time — re-anchored on
every refresh, lock-ins read from FLOW geometry */
const READ_LINE = 0.55; // a beat locks as its copy centre takes it
/* the scrub's damper: the trigger only moves a TARGET; one ticker
lerp chases it and calls apply() once per frame */
const retarget = (p: number) => {
pTarget = p;
if (!scrubOn && Math.abs(pTarget - pCur) >= SCRUB_EPS) {
scrubOn = true;
gsap.ticker.add(scrubTick); // detaches itself when settled
}
};
site-compare the two-face compare rig
The landing wall’s compare instrument: two faces of one site — the home and the enterprise page — overlaid with the house seam between them, the reveal-seam recipe refit for a wall of stills. The cut lives in one CSS custom property on the stage, so a drag re-renders nothing; pointer capture on the stage keeps the sweep when the pointer leaves the box mid-drag; and a hidden range control drives the same var, so keyboards and readers get a real slider rather than a pantomime of one. Every face image carries draggable={false} — one native image-drag would steal the pointer stream and freeze the seam mid-sweep — and each face is a light/dark pair, so the rig follows the page theme without a re-shoot.
src/app/SiteCompare.tsx
import SiteCompare from '@/app/SiteCompare';
/* the cut is one CSS var on the stage — dragging re-renders nothing */
<SiteCompare slug={site.slug} name={site.name} />
/* inside: pointer capture keeps the sweep when the pointer leaves
the box; a hidden range control drives the same var for keyboards;
draggable={false} on every face — one native image-drag would
steal the stream and freeze the seam mid-sweep */
gallery-shoot the wall’s tile shooter
The harness that stocks the landing wall: a real Chromium at the dev server, shooting the flagship home’s sections and every variant home’s hero, both themes at both cuts. Element screenshots, never scroll depths — each tile is one section’s own box, so side-by-side pairs align whatever the viewport was. Theme is seeded through the same pre-boot door the site itself uses (an init script writes gt-theme to localStorage before navigation, the root script stamps it before first paint), one full scroll pass settles every lazy-armed section before the first shot, and a selector that misses is reported and skipped, never fatal. The run’s last act writes the manifest the gallery page imports — the wall renders what was actually shot, so a missing tile is a skipped cell rather than a broken image.
docs/harness/gallery-shoot.mjs
$ node docs/harness/gallery-shoot.mjs public/shots/gallery
/* element screenshots, never scroll depths: a tile is one section's
own box, so side-by-side pairs align at any viewport */
const file = `sec-${sec.key}-${cut.key}-${theme}.jpg`;
await page.locator(sec.sel).first().screenshot({ path: file });
/* dark cuts ride the pre-boot door: theme seeded before first paint */
await context.addInitScript((t) => localStorage.setItem('gt-theme', t), theme);
/* the run ends by writing the manifest the gallery imports — a
missed selector is a reported skip, never a broken tile */
mobile-type-ladder the compact type slots
Not an engine — the system that makes a whole page’s mobile typography one decision. Under 720px the page root publishes a ladder of slots: heading sizes with their own line heights, lead, body, small and kicker steps, head and cell paddings, box air, and a 20px seam floor — the least air card copy may keep off a ground strip. Every floor below consumes the slots instead of restating sizes, so a compact-cut change is one token edit rather than a hunt across sections. The block’s position is itself a law: it is the last 720px block in the sheet, because several base rules it overrides appear after the earlier one, and these same-specificity declarations only win by following them — the ladder outranks by order, never by escalating selectors.
src/app/d/toolchain/styles.css
/* styles.css — the LAST 720px block; every floor consumes the slots */
@media (max-width: 720px) {
.toolchain-root {
--tcm-h2: 2.25rem; --tcm-h2-lh: 1.18;
--tcm-lead: 17px; --tcm-body: 16px;
--tcm-head-pt: 72px; --tcm-box-gap: 28px;
--tc-card-pad: 20px; /* the seam floor */
}
/* same specificity as the base rules — the ladder wins by ORDER,
so it lives after every rule it must override */
.toolchain-root .tc-head h2 {
font-size: var(--tcm-h2, 36px);
line-height: var(--tcm-h2-lh, 1.18);
}
}
pre-boot the before-first-paint contract
Two inline scripts in the document head run before the app exists, and everything that films or embeds the site leans on them. The first stamps the persisted theme onto the root element before first paint — dark mode is a token remap, so one attribute set early is the difference between no flash and a white flash on every dark load; the screenshot harness enters by the same door, seeding localStorage before navigation. The second is the rAF gate: requestAnimationFrame is wrapped so an embedding parent can freeze and resume every animation loop on the page with one postMessage — queued callbacks flush on resume, so shaders and scroll loops pick up exactly where they stopped rather than rebooting. That gate is how the presenter idles a whole wall of live thumbnails without touching any engine’s own code.
src/app/layout.tsx
{/* layout.tsx — two scripts that run before the app exists */}
{/* the persisted theme, stamped before first paint: no flash */}
<script dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html:
"try{var t=localStorage.getItem('gt-theme');" +
"if(t)document.documentElement.dataset.theme=t}catch(e){}" }} />
{/* the rAF gate: postMessage({type:'gt:freeze',frozen}) pauses every
loop on the page; queued callbacks flush on resume */}
four-color the palette everything resolves from
Not an engine — the ground the engines stand on. Four absolute colors: ink, raised ink, titanium, paper. Structural color everywhere derives from these — every text step is ink or white at some alpha, every hairline is titanium at some alpha, every hatch is a thin ink or white veil — and each page adds exactly one spectral accent on top. Pages never touch the raw values: each root class publishes a semantic layer (surfaces, ink steps, hairlines, hatch), and dark mode is a pure custom-property remap in which the paper family collapses onto ink, ink flips to white, and hairline alphas rise so a 1px seam still survives between two ink surfaces.
src/app/globals.css
/* globals.css — the four colors, absolute by design */
@theme {
--color-ink: #070707;
--color-ink-raised: #101010;
--color-titanium: #8a8f98;
--color-paper: #ffffff;
}
/* each root publishes a semantic layer of the four (+ alpha) … */
.toolchain-root { --tc-paper: #ffffff; --tc-ink: #070707;
--tc-hair: rgba(138, 143, 152, 0.26); --tc-accent: #2f5ce0; }
/* … and dark mode is a token remap, nothing else */
[data-theme='dark'] .toolchain-root { --tc-paper: #070707;
--tc-ink: #ffffff; --tc-hair: rgba(138, 143, 152, 0.5); }
The moving type
Every animation obeys the same discipline as the lines. The morphing headline is a single shaped text node — never per-character spans, which would break Arabic joining and Devanagari matras — with its width measured from a hidden probe and tweened once per cycle, device-pixel snapped. The locale belt seats each glyph on the orbit’s tangent and rolls words over at the sides so text never inverts, with the flag guiding each rewrite. And the compare seams on the index are the same slide-to-reveal instrument the toolchain hero uses to pull its rendered app back to the payload underneath.
