Ideating about beauty

It began with a question about what an HTML5 canvas could make happen, and a rule: talk first, build later.

do not begin the work, we are just ideating about beauty
Sep 29, 15:53

The team brought four ideas: Ink, a fluid you stir on the GPU; Living glass; Aurora threads; and A word made of light. We added combinations of them, and a few wilder things: slime mould that finds its own paths, reaction–diffusion patterns, and caustics, the bright lines light makes through water.

Six of these became first takes, each a single self-contained page: Ink, Living glass, Aurora threads, Word of light, Glass wake (the first two together) and Physarum, the slime mould. None of them knew anything about McCracken County yet.

Glowing curtains of coloured light on black — Aurora threads, one of the first takes: about a million particles drawn as curtains of light.

Light through a stained-glass window filling a stone room — The first stained glass: a window in a stone room, sunlight pouring through, colour pooling on the floor. Still no real data.

Then the parcels came up

Once the county’s parcel map was on the table, the ideas changed shape. Light could run along the real streets. Parcels could be cut from glass. The year’s sales could fall like weather. The list grew to nineteen:

Ink in the streets: parcels as walls, light running along the roads.
Stained-glass county: every parcel a pane.
The plotter: the county as an engraved plat map.
A century in thirty seconds, and Market weather.
Two for when new data arrives: Kintsugi county, where a split parcel cracks and fills with gold, and The Turning, a wave of flips like a departures board.

All nineteen went onto one hub page, maybe-19, with a player for every first take and a card for every idea. The brief was plain: “sell me on each one, maybe we’ll do them all, maybe not.”

The web as the test bed

Should this be an Apple TV app, or an iPad app? We weighed it, and the answer stuck for everything after: the web first, native only for a piece that earns it. Everything was written in raw WebGL2, with no framework and no build step: high dynamic range, bloom and tone mapping, and shaders written so they could move to Metal one day.

web is the test bed and that keeps us focused here anyway
Sep 29, 16:01

And one more ask, which turned out to set the tone for the whole site: “add a 20th for the coolest stained glass effect we can muster.” Idea 16 already was stained glass, so it became a stone room lit through a window, the first picture above.

What became of the nineteen

Built: the plotter; stained-glass county, which became the room; and Ink in the streets, which split into Light roads and Glass rain.
Folded in: A century in thirty seconds became the rain’s 3D blocks; Market weather became the colour of each sale; Kintsugi and The Turning became the layers that show splits and new parcels.
Never built: the ideas about one owner’s holdings. There is no holdings list, and the site doesn’t show who owns what.

Sep 29, 15:42The first message: what can we make happen on a canvas?
15:53“We are just ideating about beauty.” Six first takes built in the background.
16:01The web is the test bed.
16:07A twentieth idea: the coolest stained glass we can muster.
16:24Nineteen ideas on one hub page, and the county’s data on its way.