The design lab and the directions

The design lab holds twenty-seven directions for the General Translation website. Each one is a built page that runs live.

• 23 explorations: single-page directions, each a different answer to the same brief.
• 3 site concepts on the Toolchain foundation: Dossier, Orbit and Signal, each a home page plus an enterprise page.
• The production mirror at /d/production: the site that shipped at generaltranslation.com, rebuilt page for page, with the dashboard's sign-in and onboarding states (/d/production/signin, /onboarding, /consent, /device and /cli; ?state=<id> opens any state).

src/lib/directions.ts is the registry: the slug, the name, the concept and the tone of each. The gallery, the presenter, /directions/<slug>, the sitemap and the sidebar's Sites and Explorations rows all read it.

Self-contained by designCopy Anchor Link

Each direction lives under src/app/d/<slug> with its own type, colors and stylesheets. The shell's rules do not reach it, and the type lint skips the files its allow list names. A direction can be read, changed or deleted without touching another.

src/app/d/toolchain is the single source the three site concepts fork. A fork imports Toolchain's sections and re-skins them by rescoping its root class, and it never edits Toolchain's files. ARCHITECTURE.md explains the rule.

How the hub presents themCopy Anchor Link

• / reads the directions as one article, shows one live exhibit at a time, or lays them out as a grid of captures.
• /directions/<slug> presents one direction on the shell: the prototype in a frame, its captures in both themes, and what it was for.
• /compare runs two directions side by side in scroll-synced frames.
• /present is the full-screen walkthrough with the first 16 prototypes live.
• /archive/<slug> keeps a retired direction as a full-page capture with the commit that last held its code.

Keeping the mirror in stepCopy Anchor Link

/d/production follows generaltranslation.com. After a gt-cloud pull request changes a page, the change is ported here: one root class per page, the gt-cloud stylesheets as rescoped copies, and every copy recorded in scripts/lint/copies.json, which pnpm lint:copies checks.

Search enginesCopy Anchor Link

The directions reassemble GT's marketing copy, prices and legal text into design studies, so every /d/ page is noindex, follow. One layout, src/app/d/layout.tsx, sets it for the whole folder. The mirror's pages name their generaltranslation.com page as the canonical, since the live page is the original. The /directions/<slug> pages hold original writing and captures, and they are indexed. The SEO system gives the reasons.