Design lab

Seven tries, one page.

The concept came from the name: Theseus, the labyrinth, and the ship rebuilt plank by plank. Then seven single-file prototypes along a spectrum from minimal to outlandish, each with the brief that produced it. The third one became the site, and the seventh replaced its hero. Nothing was deleted.

Palette from the logo: navy #1c2341, gold #f4d98b, bone #f6efdd. Type: Geist, Geist Mono, Instrument Serif for one italic word. Open the playground to change any of it live.

01 · minimalopen ↗

Plain

Brief. Text only. Bone background, navy type, mono eyebrow, no illustration. Headline, one paragraph, four numbered steps, a small table.

What happened. Kept the type scale and the table block. Too anonymous on its own.

02 · quietopen ↗

Thread

Brief. Dark navy page. One gold thread drawn across the hero, passing three stops. Big centered headline with a serif italic.

What happened. The thread survived. The centered layout and the three cards felt like every other dev-tool page.

03 · the pickopen ↗

Labyrinth

Brief. Bone hero with a generated maze in navy lines; the thread animates from the left edge to the right. A navy band follows, then a table.

What happened. Chosen. The maze is the name, the thread is the path through it. The light-to-dark band transition is a borrowed pattern.

04 · outlandishopen ↗

Go wild

Brief. Full-viewport maze as a glowing background, 150px headline, a frieze of the logo repeated like a Greek key, then a gold section with a grid of tiles.

What happened. Unusable as a page, but the frieze was a diamond in the rough. It became the footer border.

05 · alternativeopen ↗

Editorial

Brief. Magazine layout. Masthead rules, a huge italic serif headline with two upright words, a meander frieze of the mark, three roman-numbered columns, a navy stamp with the logo, a pull quote.

What happened. Warm and unusual for a dev tool. Would need real illustration to carry the lower half.

06 · alternativeopen ↗

Terminal

Brief. Mono everything. Dotted grid, block-character wordmark, a shell-prompt headline, an install command with copy, a stats row, status glyphs, and the maze rendered in text inside a window with the solution lit in gold.

What happened. Closest to the terminal references. Reads as infrastructure, less as a product.

07 · the pick, v2open ↗

Ship

Brief. Same layout as the labyrinth, different metaphor: the Ship of Theseus. A galley whose hull strakes and sail cloths are planks, replaced one at a time from navy to gold while a counter ticks. Waves drift underneath.

What happened. Replaced the maze on the main page. The ship says the name without a caption; the maze needed one.

Working notes

The hero dictated the rest. Once the maze sat on bone next to navy type, the band, the table and the footer frieze followed without debate. Swapping the maze for the ship changed nothing below it.
The nav takes the color of the section under it, because a static nav looked wrong against both the bone hero and the navy band.
Two themes, same tokens: bone and ink. The band always inverts the page so the rhythm survives in both.
All copy is placeholder. Swap it section by section; the layout does not depend on line counts.