The phrenology grid

An engraved profile head, cut open at the crown, whose cranium is divided Fowler-style into the summit's seven themes: the provinces are the programme, and the line you write on is the cut that opens the mind.

The story

The owner's seed was a mind in free space. This concept keeps the mind and throws away the render: instead of a clay head on clouds it is a diagram, the kind of plate a nineteenth-century engraver cut for a phrenology chart, printed in one ink on flat limestone paper and relabelled for the grid. The seven provinces on the skull are the seven tracks of the programme (policy, customers, people, AI, resilience, load growth, grid edge), and their size is data: each wedge is proportional to how many sessions that theme carries in the snapshot, so AI is the big province at the back of the head and policy is the thin one at the brow. The numbers on the head are the key on the left, exactly as on Fowler's bust, and the plate's running head says so: "the mind in seven provinces, after Fowler, relabelled for the grid".

The top of the skull is open. In Fludd's diagram the open skull receives the divine intellect; here it receives the visitor. The rule the visitor writes on runs from the left margin straight through the top of the head and is the cut that removes the skullcap, so "type into the crown" is literal: the question enters the mind along the same line that opens it. It is the strongest line on the plate (2 px, every other rule is a hairline), it is the only thing that crosses into the drawing, and it ends exactly where the cut ends, at the back of the skull. The cap above the cut is drawn only as a dashed hairline and is never hatched, so the opening reads as absence, not as a lifted lid.

The first screen is a newspaper, not a hero: the facts line runs along the top edge in small mono (ETS27 · Energy Thought Summit, Austin, Texas · May 3–6, 2027 · Tickets) with the theme, "Free your mind", set between them as the one human line in Literata italic; then the dateline "May 3–6, 2027" at 240 px between two flag rules that clear its descenders; then the plate. There is no headline. The page below is a set of plates read in order, and the mind's answers are inserted into the same sequence as numbered sections (01, 02) with the question as their heading and a footnote for the source. Everything on the page is one ink; one colour, Sunset Red granite, marks only what is live now: the ticket link, the province an answer touched, the kept sessions in a filtered programme, the on-sale tiers, the caret.

The engraving is generated, not traced. A profile silhouette is rasterised, a signed distance field gives the form a light (upper left, in front of the face), and streamlines are traced through a direction field that blends the latitude lines of a tilted ellipsoid for the cranium (its pole sits inside the open cap, so the form lines visibly fan out of the opening), a second ellipsoid for the face whose pole sits above it (so the cheek reads as bracelet lines around a volume, not as the isolines of a scan), and the tangent of the outline near every edge. The eye is a bust's blank eye: lids and crease only, no pupil, with the hatching running parallel to the lids. The ear is its own small form, bounded by the helix and hatched with arcs parallel to its back rim, so the field has no whirlpool there. Lines break into dashes where the light falls, run solid in the midtones and cross-hatch twice in the shadow, with stroke weight stepping up with the tone, and the lit face carries 40 % fewer lines than the cranium, which is how a steel engraving carries value. About 3,800 strokes, 298 KB, drawn once on load.

The people are printed by the same rule. Every portrait is cropped to one head scale from a face-detection pass and printed through a line screen: tone becomes the weight of horizontal lines, as on the engraving, so the mixed sources (studio greys, stage photos, phone selfies) read as one plate, not as headshots under a filter. A mind with no portrait in the snapshot gets the plate's own bust, the engraving's profile cut at the crown and printed through the same screen. There is never an empty box.

Typography

• Libre Caslon Condensed 400 at 240 px, line-height 0.86, letter-spacing −0.005 em: the dateline, the theme ("Free your mind" on three lines), the four day numerals of the programme (3, 4, 5, 6, the May dates), the two prices ("$299", "$849") and the answer numerals ("01", "02"). On the phone the same role is 96 px.
• Literata 400 at 17 px / 1.5 with optical sizing on: every reading line, the index names, session titles (700 for speaker-led sessions, 400 italic in 64 % ink for meals and breaks), figure names at 700. Literata italic at the same size is the human caption: the theme in the facts line, the composer's placeholder ("into the crown …"), the say lines, affiliations and honours, day summaries, the questions in the edge stub.
• Martian Mono 500 at 11 px, letter-spacing +0.08 em, uppercase, wdth 100: the instrument, and only the instrument: plate numbers and running heads, times, counts, province tags, prices with fees, footnotes, the colophon. Martian Mono 800 at wdth 112, 38 units in the drawing's own space (about 33 px on the desktop plate, 19 px on the phone) for the seven numerals on the skull.
• Three sizes only, 240 : 17 : 11, a 22 : 1 span; nothing in between. The one exception is the phone's facts strip, 10 px so it holds two lines.

Colour world

• Paper #EDE8DC (limestone), flat, no grain, no sepia.
• Ink #1B1A17 for type, outline, hatching and the line screen; the same ink at 64 % for secondary lines and at 28 % for hairline rules.
• Sunset Red granite #B8574A as the single signal for what is live now: the ticket link in the facts line, the touched or answered province (its numeral, its hatch and its index entry, and its P-tags), the kept times in a filtered programme, the on-sale ticket tiers, the caret. Honours and other static facts never take the red.
• Portraits are the Whova portraits of the ETS26 stand-ins printed in one ink as a line screen (an SVG filter: luminance plus a triangle-wave screen, thresholded, mapped to ink and paper; 4 px pitch on the figures, 2 px on the 44 px thumbnails). This is the plate's printing process, not a premium filter.

Layout grammar

• Masthead: a 30 px facts strip on the top edge (three items justified left, centre, right), a 1 px flag rule, the 240 px dateline, a second flag rule 10 px below the descender of the y. Facts in the corners, never centre-stacked.
• Plate I fills exactly the rest of the first viewport (1440 × 900). The head is placed on the right at 860 px wide, facing left, cropped by the fold at the jaw and nearly touching the right edge; it is never whole and never centred. The left column holds, in order, the running head (kept inside the column so nothing is printed over the drawing), the composer rule, the three suggestions on a line of their own under it ("try · who speaks tuesday · what does a pass cost · where is it"), the verbs, the index of seven provinces with session and mind counts, and an edge-parked stub flush to the left edge with other visitors' questions.
• Below: answer sections in a two-column grid (296 px numeral column, content column), then Plates II–VI, each a running head in mono, a hairline, and one giant element: the theme on three lines; the figures (two large, four, then seven across) and the index of 77 minds as a dense printed index in three columns without rules (number, name, organisation in italic, P-tags; 820 px where the ruled ledger ran 2,150); the programme as four day columns, each headed by its 240 px date numeral; the pass as the two prices people actually pay, side by side, with the four tiers across the full measure (tier · phase window · price with fees · status); the place on a plate of its own. Every row on the page is a hairline, never a card; no radius anywhere.
• Phone (390): the facts strip holds two lines, the dateline breaks into two lines at 96 px with the year set right so the y's descender falls into open paper, the verbs explain the plate before the head, the head keeps poster scale (500 px wide, all seven numerals inside the frame) with the composer rule still running into the crown, the plate caption and the index stack underneath (counts under the names below 600 px), the figures go two across, the index to two columns of names and tags, the days stack, each tier reads its name and price on one line with its window and status under them, and every label-and-value ledger stacks label over value.

Motion and life

• The engraving draws itself once on load: outline and features draw along their length (1.5 s), the province boundaries follow (from 1.1 s), the cap's dashed line last; the hatching wipes in from the face to the back of the skull over 2.3 s behind a clip rectangle. Everything is at rest well before 4 s. "redraw" in the running head replays it; prefers-reduced-motion gets the finished plate.
• Nothing else moves until a province is touched: hovering a province or its index entry turns that province's hatch, numeral and entry granite together; clicking scrolls to the programme and dims every session outside it, with a one-line filter bar to clear.
• The caret on the composer rule blinks only while the composer has focus, so the first frame holds it solid.
• The edge stub rotates one moderated question every seven seconds until the visitor asks their own.

The fork and the mind

• The fork is printed as verbs, in the label face, weighted differently: touch (a province, and the programme opens below), type (into the crown, and the mind composes an answer in place), read (the plates in order). No two cards. The standard route is the page read in order, plate by plate; the mind is the page rearranged.
• The composer is a rule, not a box: a bold "type" at its left, a granite caret, the placeholder "into the crown …" in Literata italic, and three suggestion verbs on a line under the rule. Enter is implied by the rule; there is no send button. The rule is also the cut through the skull.
• An answer is a change in the material, then a section in the grid: the province it touched turns granite on the head and in the index, and a numbered section is inserted after the last one with the question as its heading in sentence case, a 45-word say line in Literata italic, components that inherit the page's type and spacing (session rows, one-ink portraits through the line screen, ticket rows, place ledger), and a mono footnote naming the snapshot and the province. Answer 01 ("Who's speaking about AI on Wednesday") is already composed on the page; the mockup's composer really composes 02, 03 … from the embedded snapshot (days, provinces, passes, place, and the portrait crop table).
• The omnipresent assistant is the rule in the chrome plus the edge stub ("Asked on this plate · composed below as 01"), never a floating pill.
• The state is exposed lab-notebook style in the footer: "snapshot 2026-10-13 · 77 speakers · 50 sessions · sample data (ETS26 stand-ins) · answers composed by the mind".

What to build next

• Make the plate the real navigation: provinces link to track pages, the index to the lineup entries, the running heads to plates on the standard route; a same-document view transition should carry the dateline into a compact masthead when the mind takes over.
• Wire the composer to the real mind (the mechanics team's streaming model) and keep the contract in this mockup: answers inherit the page's components, numbered sections persist, sources are footnotes, "thinking" is the province hatch re-drawing in granite rather than a spinner.
• Regenerate the engraving from the shipped profile when the themes are final: make-head.py in this folder is the generator (uv run --script make-head.py head.svg); province weights, the light, the cut height, the ear and eye geometry and the face ellipsoid are parameters at the top of the file, each overridable from the environment. A second plate (the venue, once announced, or the Texas interconnection) can use the same engine.
• Bake the line screen at build time (or in the image CDN) instead of an SVG filter per portrait, and keep the crop table with the speaker record; ask the 17 speakers whose source photos are framed tighter than the plate's head scale for a looser crop.
• Replace the ETS26 stand-ins and the invented track groupings with the ETS27 programme; the index counts and the province sizes recompute from the data.
• Build the lineup's hover state (a portrait printing on the index entry) and a print stylesheet; the page is already a poster.

Known gaps

• The phone page is 16,800 px (it was 21,400): the programme is still 5,100 px of four stacked days and the lineup 5,300 px. A phone-only day switcher under the four numerals would halve it without changing the desktop plate.
• The shared render tool caps desktop-full.png at 6,000 px, so Plates IV–VI appear only in the scroll shots (desktop-s2, desktop-s3); this fixer did not change the shared tool.
• Plate II still runs on the plates' common beat (running head, hairline, display); the full-bleed moments are now the four day numerals and the two prices.

Risks

• The costume risk named in the seed: this dies the moment someone adds sepia, a texture overlay, ornamental borders or Victorian lettering. The strictness is the concept: flat paper, one ink, a modern mono for every instrument label, the head cropped at poster scale.
• The head could read as a mascot if it is ever shown whole and centred, or if a face from the lineup is pasted inside it. It stays a diagram.
• Mono on every small label was a quiet tell; it is now kept to the instrument (numbers, times, counts, tags, footnotes) and every human caption is Literata italic. A build must hold that split or the mono becomes a texture again.
• The portraits in one ink are the plate's printing process, not a filter; the moment colour photography enters the page the rule breaks, so the standard route's lineup pages must either keep the line screen or make colour a deliberate second material.
• "After Fowler" names phrenology's source honestly; if Zpryme's comms team reads the pseudoscience as baggage, the caption can drop the attribution and keep "the mind in seven provinces" without changing the drawing.
• A real consent strip across the bottom of the first screen covers the edge stub; the facts line, the dateline, the head and the index still read.