The pass

The site is a lanyard pass filling the viewport: the dates printed at 380 px, the city running up a perforated edge, a holographic strip that is the only place colour exists, and the perforation is the fork. Tear left and the pass is read in order; tear right and the stub at the edge asks the mind, which answers by tearing more stubs off the same roll.

This is version 2, after the round-one jury. Version 1, the one the owner may have seen, is kept unchanged in v1/ with its own shots.

The story

Every summit already hands its visitors one object, and nobody has built the site out of it. ETS27's pass is near-black card stock printed in one cream ink, hung from a woven Zpryme strap that runs off the top of the screen into a punched slot. The corners carry the facts a jury's usability score says winners forget: the edition and the map top-left, tickets with the from-price and the dates top-right. "May 3–6" is the biggest thing on the pass and owns the bottom-left corner on the same margin as the top. "Austin" runs vertically along the perforation. "Free Your Mind" is the pass's security feature: knockout type that is the only window onto a holographic foil, and the foil is the net-load curve of the Texas grid for May 3–6 of the year before, so the industry's own weather is printed into the theme. Nothing on the first screen explains this; the colophon does.

The perforation is a real dashed cut with die-cut notches at both ends, and the verbs are printed along it in the label face: "tear left · read in order" and "tear right · ask the mind". Each verb is printed a second time where the eye already lands: "tear left · read in order →" opens the map in the top-left corner, and "tear right · ask the mind" heads the stub. The stub beyond the cut is the mind's door; under the line to write on it lists what other visitors asked here, and it already carries one answer, numbered 01, with its source footnote, so a judge sees the mechanic working in the first second.

Below the fold, every unit is a stub torn off the same roll, and the roll changes tempo: the theme is a breath screen with nothing but the sentence and a security thread of the same foil; the lineup is a full-bleed roll of 77 speaker passes with the word printed on its first stub and the portraits printed in the pass's one ink; the four days open as the dash in "3–6" torn into four numerals, 3 4 5 6, before 50 session stubs; then the city; then four ticket stubs whose prices break the cut above them; then a footer that exposes the snapshot state lab-notebook style.

Typography

Three families, the Industrial Americana system from the synthesis shortlist, loaded from Google Fonts as variable fonts.

Big Shoulders (opsz 10–72, wght 100–900), the display and label face. "3–6" at 380 px, wght 900, opsz 72, line-height 0.8. "Free Your / Mind" on the strip at 224 px, two lines, leading 0.85, optically aligned so the ink of the F and the M starts on the same column as "ETS27" and "May". "May", "Austin" and the section words at 140 px, wght 900. Session and speaker titles at 40 px, wght 700, opsz 72, leading 0.92; answer headings in the stub at 28 px so a question holds one or two lines. Labels, corners, badges and footnotes at 13 px and 11 px, wght 600–800, opsz 10, uppercase, tracked +0.06–0.08 em; the fork verbs on the cut at 16 px, the map verb at 600 and 66 % ink, the mind verb at 800 and full ink, so the fork weighs unevenly.
Literata (opsz 7–72, wght 200–900, italic), the reading face. The theme sentence as the breath screen at 104 px, wght 200, opsz 72; the venue sentence at 40 px, wght 300. Everything readable at 13 px, opsz 7, leading 1.4; the mind's say line and the asked-here questions in the italic cut.
Handjet (ELSH 0–16, ELGR 1–2, wght 100–900), numerals only: times, prices, serials, answer numbers and day numbers. Element shape 2 (square cells) for times, prices and serials, like a thermal-printer readout. The four-day spread is set at 380 px in shape 8, the solid round cell, a metering readout; each day's own numeral locks from round (8) to square (7), the cells of its printed times, as that day scrolls into view. Shapes 1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14 and 15 are hollow and 12 to 13 turn into clover cells at display size, so they are never used.

Sizes on a 1440 × 900 pass: 380 / 224 / 140 / 40 / 13 px, a 29:1 span from the dates to the fine print. The pass's three display sizes are fluid against the body column and the pass height (380 / 224 / 140 at 1440 × 900, larger on a 1920 × 1080 screen, smaller on a 1024 laptop) so the lockup always runs up to the city without touching it. On the phone: 210 / 88 / 88 or 56 / 30 / 13.

Colour world

Card stock #0F0E0C (the page, every stub).
Ink #EFE8D8 (cream), with the same ink at 66 % and 40 % for secondary and tertiary text.
Hole #CDC2A6: what shows through a punched perforation, the lanyard slot and the notches. Strap #E4DBC3.
Live #B8574A, Sunset Red granite, for exactly two things: what is on sale now and what other visitors asked here.
The holographic strip is the only other colour and it is data. It is rendered at device resolution, never as a scaled bitmap: brushed silver (OKLCH L 0.76–0.79, C 0.012, one device-pixel hairline at a time) above the net-load curve, and below it one colour per hour printed in four inks, teal for the midday belly, sea green for the night, gold for the shoulders and orange for the evening peak (OKLCH hues 204, 160, 80, 48). The curve runs between the hourly values as one landscape across both lines of the lockup: the four evening peaks rise into "Free Your", the midday bellies sink into "Mind", and the trace itself is printed in cream at 1.25 px. A hairline keyline inside every letter gives the knockout a stamped foil's edge. The two ink families never meet, so there is no chartreuse and no purple, and the hourly ink changes keep the foil from ever reading as gradient text.
The same foil runs as a full-bleed security thread across the theme screen, where the four duck curves of May 3–6 read plainly as a landscape.
The portraits are printed in the pass's one ink: per-image levels, local contrast so eyes and mouths survive, then Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion to cream on stock at one CSS pixel per dot. Without script they fall back to a continuous cream-on-stock duotone.

No gradient surfaces, no blur, no shadow, no radius on the pass, no acid green, no purple anywhere.

Layout grammar

The pass is the viewport, 1440 × 900, not an object inside it: body column, a 56 px perforation column, a 300 px stub. Facts in the corners, the strip block top-left under the corner, the one big thing (the dates) bottom-left on the same margin as the top, the city vertical against the cut, the mind on the stub. Nothing essential lives in the bottom 72 px, so a consent strip covers no fact, no link and no question. Nothing is centre-stacked; the only centred element is the strap, which is not text, and where the two top corners leave no room for it (below 1120 px wide) the pass simply hangs from its perforation.

Below the pass the roll continues, and three of the five sections break the opening beat:

The theme is the breath: a perforation, one label line, the theme sentence at 104 px across the full measure, the foil thread edge to edge, then the edition lineage (Keep Earth Weird, Imagine, Ethos, Hack the Planet, Free Your Mind) as a single label line beside one dry sentence about who comes.
The lineup is a full-bleed roll with no section header: its first stub carries "Line / up" at 140 px and the sample-data note, then 77 speaker passes torn at different widths (keynotes 320 px, speakers 248, moderators 196), each with its slot and serial at its own offset along the top edge, portraits edge to edge between vertical perforations. An A-to-Z index of all 77 follows, open on a desk and folded on a phone.
The four days open on one spread: four stubs with the numerals 3 4 5 6 at 380 px, the day's name, what happens and the slot count, each a link into the day; then the 50 session stubs on a four-column grid (time, format badge, title and people, serial number).
The city and the passes keep the canonical opening (a 140 px word left, a right-aligned label block), and passes now come last, just before the footer. On-sale tickets get more paper than later phases, and every price numeral breaks the perforation above its stub.

On the phone the pass turns portrait, which is what a lanyard pass is: strap and slot at the top centre with the corners below them, the strip at 88 px on two lines, "May" over "3–6" at 210 px, the map line, "Austin" at 88 px, then a horizontal cut with die-cut half-notches at both edges, "tear up · read in order" above it and "tear down · ask the mind" below, then the stub with the line, the asked-here questions and the answer. The lineup roll stays horizontal (swipe), the four days become a two-by-two spread, session stubs keep the serial on the time row, and the tickets stack with each price breaking its own cut.

Motion and life

Entry, once: the strap settles like a pass just hung (1.6 s), the dates print in from the left (1.1 s), the city rises (1.2 s), the foil develops from cream to colour in place (1.4 s), and one cream specular line crosses the silver as it does. Everything is at rest by about five seconds.
The foil's colour never moves; light does. A cream specular line crosses the silver every 18 s, paused when the strip is off-screen or the tab is hidden.
The composer's caret pulses; the "on sale" squares pulse; the asked-here list takes a new moderated question every nine seconds, the oldest falling off the bottom.
Tearing right rocks the stub 2.4° on its hinge and focuses the line. Asking, by typing or by tapping someone else's question, tears a new numbered stub off the roll inside the stub column.
Each day's numeral locks from round to square cells as the day arrives, bound to animation-timeline: view(), no scroll listener. Prices switch to round cells on hover.
prefers-reduced-motion gets the final frame of everything; the footer carries "Motion on" and "Foil on" as designed-in controls.

The fork and the mind

The fork is the perforation. Two verbs are printed along the cut and they weigh differently: "tear left" opens the map, which is the page read in order; "tear right" asks the mind, which is the page rearranged. Neither is a card, and each verb is printed once more where the eye already is: the map verb leads the navigation in the top-left corner, the mind verb heads the stub.

The assistant lives in the chrome as a line to write on: a 13 px label, a hairline rule with a caret at its left, no box, no pill, no send button. Under it, in place of suggestion chips, sits what other visitors asked here: three moderated questions in Literata italic with how long ago, each one a way to ask the same thing. That is the prompt, and it lives at the top of the stub, not in the corner a support widget would take.

An answer is a stub torn off the roll: the question becomes the heading in sentence case, numbered in Handjet (01, 02) so the thread reads as a table of contents, the say line is Literata italic (under 45 words), the hits are rows in the page's own grid with times in the metering face and a hanging indent, and the source is a footnote. Older answers stay as sections. On the mockup, 01 "Who's speaking Tuesday" is already composed from the agenda, and every asked-here question composes a real answer from the same snapshot (pass prices, the city and venue state, Thursday's half day, the data-center sessions, what a pass includes, who moderates the rate design breakout); anything else gets the honest "I don't have that yet" stub.

On the standard route the same stub column would ride along as the pass's edge on every page, so the omnipresent assistant is literally the part of the pass you keep.

What changed after the jury

The foil: re-rendered at device resolution with a continuous curve, four inks per hour, 1 px brushed silver, a cream trace and a cream specular line; the lilac and cyan specular patch, the stepped wedges and the speck at every step corner are gone, and on the phone the letters read first.
The copy that explained the trick: the caption under the lockup and the two "the map / the mind" columns in the theme are gone; the strip's provenance moved to the colophon.
Tempo: the theme became a breath screen with the foil thread, the lineup a full-bleed roll with the word on its first stub, the four days a 380 px spread; passes moved last so the closing shot holds all four prices.
The first screen: a 64 px lanyard into a fitted slot, a bigger lockup that fills the void beside the strap, the dates down on the bottom margin, the map moved out of the consent-strip band into the top-left corner, the from-price in the top-right corner as an underlined link.
The fork: verbs at 16 px with unequal weight along the cut, repeated horizontally where the eye lands, and on the phone renamed to the direction of the cut.
The roll: stubs torn at widths by role with offset slots and serials; ticket stubs widened for what is on sale and every price breaking its cut; portraits printed by error diffusion so every face reads.
The phone: serials on the time row, the 77-name list folded into an index, the strap clear of the corners, no sideways scroll.

Deliberately not taken: the verbs did not become horizontal labels at the notches (the concept prints them along the cut, and the horizontal repeats do that job); the mind's verb did not turn red (red stays reserved for what is on sale and what was asked here); Handjet stays as the metering face the jurors scored as a reasoned tell, now held to square cells for small numerals and round cells for the one spread; and there is no extra breath stub between the lineup and the four days, because the spread itself changes the tempo there.

What to build next

Replace the sample trace with the real ERCOT net-load snapshot for May 3–6, 2026, baked as JSON, and let the production site refresh it from Grid Status nightly.
Make the tear real: a clip-path tween along the perforation on the first interaction, with a same-document view transition carrying the lockup into the chrome of the map route or the mind route.
The mind: wire the composer to the real retrieval layer the mechanics team is designing; keep the stub grammar (heading, say, hits, source) as the only output format, and feed the asked-here list from the moderation queue.
Speaker passes: the roll should open a full pass on tap (portrait in colour, bio, sessions), and the lineup needs the agenda's room data once it exists.
Print it: the first screen is a poster and the pass itself can be the physical badge design for Austin.

Risks

The risk line is a card. The guard: the pass must stay the viewport, no radius, no shadow, the perforation a real dashed cut, colour only inside the strip and its thread. Any "panel" that creeps in below the fold breaks the roll.
The foil could still read as decoration if the data is never named. The colophon names it; the thread shows it plainly; the mind should answer "what is the strip?" in production.
Eleven 13 px rows on the stub are dense; on a 900 px viewport the asked-here list, the answer and its source fit with little to spare. The production stub scrolls inside its column, as it does here.
Portraits printed in one ink are still tell 18 with a reason. Error diffusion keeps every face legible, and the speaker pass on tap is where colour belongs, never the roll.
The page is long (about 11,800 px on desktop). It is a roll, and it should feel like one; the breath screen, the full-bleed roll and the four-day spread are the three changes of tempo, and quiet slots (meals, breaks) already collapse into one-line stubs.

Known gaps

The trace is a sample shaped like ERCOT net load, not the real May 3–6, 2026 data; the colophon says so.
Portraits are dithered in the browser from the ETS26 image hosts, which send open CORS headers today; if a host stops, those portraits fall back to the duotone filter.
The render tool captures the foil at rest; the specular sweep and the day-numeral lock are only visible live or in mid-scroll shots.