# Original ink

The team's own marks, preserved as the identity of the opening.

## What it does

The existing 540×130 crop of the owner's photograph supplies the visible letter shapes. A luminance-to-alpha extraction removes the old paper while retaining the original ink boundaries and irregularities; no letter shape was redrawn. Sixteen SVG mask guides follow the stem and crossbar of the f, each bowl and shoulder, the two parts of the y, the separate i dot, and the bowl and stem of the d. These guides are invisible: they reveal the photographed ink rather than becoming new lettering.

The opening takes 4.94 seconds, including a short initial pause. Stroke lengths have different durations, individual strokes accelerate and settle slightly, and the nib lifts between letters and waits longer between words. The absorbed edge grows from a 0.18 to 0.60 source-pixel blur as the phrase is written; a crisp ink layer remains above it. The line stays small on desktop and unbroken on a phone.

## Paper and typography

Warm off-white paper (`#f4f1e9`), an unobtrusive light falloff, and static, low-opacity procedural fibres. The grain is made with SVG turbulence and diffuse lighting, so it requires no texture photograph or network request. The title is the photographed hand; the only supporting face is DM Mono Regular.

## Libraries and assets

No JavaScript library. Native SVG masks give direct control of the real ink and require less machinery than an animation framework. `ink.png` is derived only from `design/rounds/r01-opening/_assets/lettering-crop.png`, itself cropped from the owner's `design/inspiration/2026-10-21-free-your-mind-sketchbook.png`. Tonal extraction: mean RGB luminance, alpha clamped from `(145 − luminance) / 105`, with alpha below 0.035 removed; the ink is recoloured to a warm near-black. This extraction does not reconstruct missing detail.

DM Mono is from the [Google Fonts source](https://github.com/google/fonts/tree/main/ofl/dmmono), stored locally as WOFF2. Its `DMMono-OFL.txt` is included. No third-party image is used.

## Known gaps

- The supplied photo has roughly 460 pixels of lettering width. A flat, high-resolution scan would improve edges at larger display sizes.
- The motion is a considered reconstruction of writing order, not recorded motion of the original hand. The guide mask can expose a few pixels of a neighbouring stroke at an intersection.
- This is the fixed opening phrase. Arbitrary new text needs new source lettering and guides, or the font route.
- The bleed is a restrained visual approximation. Physical paper absorption and real-phone Safari performance have not been measured.

## Verification

Rendered with the project's `concepts/tools/render.cjs`, using headless Chrome at 1440×900 and 390×844, with a 5000 ms settle and no scrolling. Both PNGs were inspected. Frozen writing frames at 900, 1800, 2800, 3700, and 5400 ms were also inspected, including partial letters. The evidence lives in `shots/`.

Replay works with a pointer and keyboard. Initial reduced motion, changing reduced-motion preference, and replay under reduced motion all show the finished line. The page does not scroll at 320×568, 390×844, 844×390, 1440×900, or 1920×1080. A readable static phrase remains with JavaScript disabled. All headless browser instances were closed after their checks.

## Controls and capture

Use the replay button to restart. Add `?t=1800` to freeze at an elapsed millisecond; `?t=0` shows the blank page. Reduced motion overrides this parameter. `window.demo.draw(ms)` is a deterministic capture hook. The page stops scheduling animation frames after the ink has settled.

## Local footprint

The HTML, script, loaded fonts, and ink asset total approximately 31.3 KiB before HTTP compression. There are no external runtime requests. In the local 390×844, DPR 2 headless check, initial readiness was 57 ms and mean JavaScript draw cost was 0.01 ms across thirty sample times. These are local measurements, not network-load or physical-device benchmarks.