Kelly's window

A blank limestone wall with one ring of twelve colour squares set on point, after Ellsworth Kelly's "Austin"; the ring is a twelve-hour dial, Austin's clock decides which pane is lit, and every square is a door into the site.

The story

Kelly's chapel is the one world-class piece of colour in Austin, and it is colour as light on stone: a single geometric event on a huge quiet ground, the opposite of a gradient. The page keeps that discipline. Above the fold there is nothing but the wall, the ring and the facts in the corners. The ring has twelve squares in Kelly's starburst order (amber, yellow-green, green, teal, blue, indigo, violet, purple, magenta, crimson, red, orange) and twelve destinations clockwise from the top: Ask, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Lineup, Theme, Venue, Tickets, Partners, Press, Speak. It reads as the window at night: dark glass all round and one pane lit, the pane at Austin's hour, which throws a short flat patch of its colour through the glass onto the stone inside the dial. At 04:21 Thursday burns blue and its light falls toward the centre; at noon Ask burns amber. The light hands over at the top of the hour and leans half a degree a minute in between, so the page is never the same twice, which was Kelly's point. Scroll, and the window flies into the top-right corner of a running head and becomes the navigation, lighting whichever section you are reading. Halfway down it comes back at full scale as the calendar: the four days of the summit are the panes at one, two, three and four o'clock. Type on the rule at the bottom and the panes that answer light up: the ring is the mind's dial. No photograph appears at rest; the twelve colours are the only picture.

Typography

Two faces, three sizes, and one poster exception.

• Display: Libre Caslon Condensed, weight 700, 120 px on desktop and 64 px on the phone, leading 0.86, tracking −0.005 em. Used for "ETS27" in the top-left corner, every section title ("Who's speaking Tuesday", "Lineup", "Monday", "Tickets", "Austin", "Ask the window") and the dates of the calendar beat ("May 3–6").
• Reading: Mona Sans, weight 400, 16 px (15 px on the phone), leading 1.45, width axis 100. The mind's "say" line is the same family at a different axis: italic, weight 300, width 112.
• Labels: Mona Sans, weight 500, 12 px (11 px on the phone), tracking 0.03 em, always full ink. Corners, the ring's labels, timetable hours, footnotes, the composer's suggestions, the corner index of answers and the lab-notebook state line.
• The timetable hours use Mona Sans's proportional figures. Its tabular figures are a monospace-looking design (slashed zero, footed one) that read as a third face, so they are off.
• Ratio 120:12, ten to one. The theme section is the one word bigger than the screen: "Free / Your / Mind" in Libre Caslon Condensed 700 at 23.5 vw (about 340 px at 1440), leading 0.8, each line stepped half an em further right.
• Names on the lineup wall are Mona Sans 650 with the organisation at weight 300 and width 92. The running head names the current section in Mona Sans 650 at 16 px.

Colour world

• Limestone #EBE8E0, flat, no texture; ink #15110E.
• The twelve squares, clockwise from the top: #F0A51B amber, #A8C83A yellow-green, #2E9E4F green, #1A8F86 teal, #2B63B4 blue, #2F3F99 indigo, #4F2E8C violet, #6F2E8A purple, #A32B6F magenta, #C22046 crimson, #DC3F2B red, #EC6D22 orange.
• Dark glass (unlit) is each colour at OKLab lightness 0.30 with 55 % of its chroma (#462500, #273400, #003914, #003632, #132D54, #1F2A56, #312352, #3D1E4B, #4E1534, #570B1C, #580D05, #521800), so every pane keeps its hue, jewel-deep instead of brown, and a greyscale screenshot shows one pane on.
• Lit is the colour itself; the four deep hues (indigo, violet, purple, magenta) are lifted to OKLab lightness 0.50 when lit, because light through them has to read as light. A lit pane carries a 1 px inner edge a little lighter than its glass, the rim of the block catching the light.
• Light levels: the hour's pane is lit; the pane before it keeps a sixth of its light; the next pane warms from a sixth to nearly half as the minutes pass; the other nine are dark glass.
• Cast light is one flat parallelogram per lit pane: the pane's own square stretched along the light to about one and a third panes, leaning a little the way the sun stands, laid on the stone inside the dial a sliver beyond the glass, at 44 % opacity with a hard edge, ending inside the ring and never crossing another pane. There is no gradient, glow, blur, shadow or grain anywhere on the page.
• The day squares carry their colour into the document as a 7 px diamond before each speaker's name, so colour always means something (which day).

Layout grammar

• First screen: facts in the four corners, one object in the middle. Top-left "ETS27" with the summit's name, the dates, the Austin clock in bold ("12:11 in Austin · the window keeps the hour") and under it the numbered index of answers on the page ("01 who's speaking tuesday ↓"); top-right the city and "venue announced soon"; bottom-left "turn ↻" in the gutter; the strip along the bottom. Nothing is centre-stacked under the ring; the ring's own twelve labels sit around it like hour marks.
• Ring geometry at 1440: squares 60 px on point at radius 176 (outer diameter about 436 px, under a third of the width, Kelly's fifth of the facade). One label rule: each label sits 16 px beyond its pane's outer corner, centred on the pane's radius. On the phone the ring's window is the screen's width: 36 px squares at radius 92 px, 11 px short labels ("Mon", "Tue"), lifted to sit under the dateline; the city drops under the dates at label size so the wordmark owns the corner.
• The bottom edge is a fixed stone strip with one voice per side: "Free Your Mind" on the left, the composer rule with two suggestions in the middle, "Tickets → from $320.89" on the right. On the phone it is two rows: the rule, then "Free Your Mind" and the ticket link.
• Past the first screen the top is a running head with an edge: an 88 px stone band (60 px on the phone) closed by a 1 px ink rule, the facts on the left, and on the right "the window ↑" as its own link, the current section's name in bold, and the docked window at 72 px with only that section's pane lit.
• The document below is one long typeset page in the order of the dial: the composed answer 01, Theme, Lineup, the four days, Monday to Thursday, Tickets, Austin, Partners, Press, Speak, Ask, footer. Every section opens with the same marker: a 40 px window with only that section's panes lit, a bold label, a 12 px caption.
• The four days is the one full-bleed beat: a whole screen of the window at hero scale with Monday to Thursday lit and labelled with their dates, "May 3–6" in Caslon in the corner, and a caption that says the summit is a quarter of the window.
• Timetables are rows with a 120 px hour column and hairlines, no cards. The lineup is a three-column donor wall of names (one column on the phone), partners are one paragraph with the tier in bold, tickets are four rows.
• Tempo changes: the wall (empty), the answer (rows), the theme (poster words), the lineup (dense wall), the window again as a calendar (empty), the days (rows), then a single rule to write on.

Motion and life

• Entry: the window starts as all dark glass and lights its hour over about a second; the light patch grows with it. After that nothing moves except the caret and the light.
• Time: the lit pane is the hour on the twelve-hour dial and hands over at the top of the hour; the sun angle is (hour + minutes/60) × 30°, so the light leans half a degree a minute toward the next door and the next pane slowly warms. The corner reads "04:21 in Austin · the window keeps the hour".
• Turn: ← → or a sideways swipe (trackpad or touch) over the window moves the light to another hour; vertical scrolling always scrolls the page. Hovering a pane swings the light to it; clicking or tapping goes to its section. After fourteen idle seconds the light returns to Austin's hour.
• Dock: a CSS scroll-driven animation (no JS) carries the ring from centre stage into the running head over the first 100 vh of scroll, where it shrinks to 72 px and lights the current section (IntersectionObserver names it in the head). Browsers without scroll-driven animations dock on a class instead.
• The four days light pane by pane, Monday to Thursday, the first time the beat comes into view.
• The mind: typing on the rule lights the panes that answer in real time, each throwing its light straight in toward the centre; Enter composes a numbered section and adds it to the corner index. "Thinking" is the light swinging to the answering panes, never a shimmer or dots.
• Reduced motion: the window renders at its hour with no entry sweep, no caret blink and no calendar sequence; the dock still works because it is pure CSS.
• With JS off the page is fully readable: all twelve squares show at full colour, the sections and the calendar are static HTML, the facts and ticket link are plain text.
• Review hook: ?at=HH:MM pins the window to an hour, so a reviewer can see 04:21 or 18:30 without waiting for it.

The fork and the mind

• The fork is printed as two verbs that weigh differently. "turn ↻" sits in the left gutter of the first screen with a one-line instruction (the standard route: turn the window to a door, or simply read the page in order). "ask" sits at the left of the hairline rule along the bottom edge with a blinking caret and two suggestions ("who speaks tuesday", "what does a pass cost"), no box, no pill, no send button. No two equal cards anywhere.
• The standard route is the page read in order, section by section in the dial's order, with the docked window and the running head as the only navigation; the lit pane doubles as a progress mark.
• Ask-the-mind is the page rearranged: a question lights the panes that answer while you type, and on Enter a numbered answer lands in the thread below the window, in the page's own grid: the question as its Caslon heading, a 45-word "say" line in the italic wide axis, the component beneath (a timetable, a link, a price line), a footnote in 12 px naming the source. Answer 01 ("Who's speaking Tuesday") is already composed on the page, and the corner index under the clock lists every answer as a table of contents.
• The omnipresent assistant is the rule itself, fixed along the bottom edge of every screen. The document ends on one rule: under "Ask the window" the big rule takes over and the strip's composer stands down while it is on screen; beneath it "Others asked on this page" are other visitors' questions, which write themselves onto the rule when touched. In this mockup the mind is a keyword router over the sample data (days, tickets, venue, partners, press, speak, theme, lineup, dates); the production model slots into the same grammar and never gets to pick a style.

What to build next

• Replace the router with the real mind, keeping the contract: it returns which panes to light, a heading, a say line under 45 words, a component id with data, and a source; the page supplies every style.
• Real time: tie the light to Austin's actual sun (its azimuth for the lean, its elevation for the length of the patch, interior light at night) and let the four days of the summit use the dial as a live "now" indicator during ETS27.
• A same-document view transition when a pane is clicked, so the window physically flies to the section's marker instead of scrolling past it.
• Speaker pages: the hover portrait becomes a tap-to-open stub, still no grid of headshots; the wall stays the lineup.
• A printable poster: the first screen at A0 is already the poster, the hour of printing lit.
• Consent: the strip sits where cookie banners land; production passes the banner's height to the strip so the rule docks above it.
• Hook the lineup, agenda, tickets and partners to the real ETS27 data when it exists; every placeholder is already labelled in the markup.

Risks

• The ring is read as a colour-wheel logo or a rainbow. The defence is in the pixels now and must stay: only one pane is lit at any hour and at least nine are dark glass, the squares are small and flat and in Kelly's exact order, the wall is blank, the type is black and small, and nothing is ever centre-stacked under the ring. If anyone proposes a gradient, a glow, a texture or a bigger ring, the concept is over.
• The cast light reads as a decorative ribbon or as a thirteenth pane rather than light. It is kept rule-bound (one sun, one short flat patch per lit pane, a shared lean, a hard edge, never across the ring, never animated for its own sake), and it is the only atmosphere.
• Night hours light the same panes as day hours because the dial is a clock, not a sun; honest, but a visitor may expect darkness at 3 am. The real-sun version in "what to build next" answers it.
• Restraint can read as emptiness in a thumbnail; one burning pane in a dark ring is what carries the 134 px gallery thumbnail now, without the ring becoming a logo on the full screen.
• The wall of 77 names is complete rather than curated; on the phone it is long. A curated "featured" cut is a data decision for ETS27, not a layout change.

Revision after the round-one jurors (2026-10-15)

The round-one version is kept unchanged in v1/ (page, shots, concept, judging). What changed and why:

• The dial now reads as the window at night: dark glass mixed in OKLab instead of 61 % colour, one pane lit at the hour, the deep hues lifted when lit, a 1 px rim on the lit pane.
• The two long feathered ribbons through the ring are gone. The light is one short, flat, hard-edged parallelogram per lit pane, falling in through the glass. It goes inward rather than outward because it then reads as light entering the room (outward patches read as kites and pointers and shoved the labels around), and it stays short, so the ring keeps its geometry.
• The "sparkle" marker was a clipped window: the marker's outer viewBox started at −17 while the symbol was placed at the origin, so only one quadrant (two or three panes) ever showed. It is now a whole 40 px window.
• The running head has an edge, a legible 72 px window, the section's name and a separate up link; the strip has one voice per side; the answer index moved to the top-left corner; the document ends on one rule; the phone hero carries the screen.
• New: the four days as a full-bleed calendar beat between the lineup and Monday, the tempo change the page lacked.
• Kept deliberately: the ring's size (the concept's own risk line), the two faces (Libre Caslon Condensed and Mona Sans are the concept's type system), the flat limestone (no texture, by the seed's risk line).