Design Exploration · OpenProse × JHDesign · Spring 2026

Branding an AI programming paradigm.

Communicating quality and stability with useful elegance in a growing sea of noise.

Building the workshop while working in it.

// .agents/prose/src/review-state-stays-coherent.prose.md
name: review-state-stays-coherent
kind: responsibility

Criteria · `agent-close.mjs --audit-all` must read OPEN=0 for every closed round
Constraints · never close a comment to make the audit green — a clean audit is
              the result of coherent state, not the goal to be gamed

37 approaches. 29 marks.

Two months of parallel explorations looking for the best surface area. Every approach is a working page.

Round-one stars and comments were compiled into a written document, DAN-PRINCIPLES.md: seven invariants, five named rejects. Later rounds designed against that target.

The top of the ratings shared a look: warm serif editorial. By 2026 that look was everywhere. Serif fonts were undergoing their vibe-coded assault, the default dress of generated landing pages. OpenProse needed its own face.

The answer stepped sideways: monospace families for the running voice, and Kecal for the accents. Monotypes and Kecal became a way to rise above the noise and contribute to legibility: clearly readable, quietly esoteric, a face no generator reaches for. Kecal is an open typeface (OFL) by FungiType: Rodrigo Fuenzalida, Jordan Egstad, and Jiří Krblich. Used with thanks.

In parallel the voice settled: monospace families for the running text, Tufte density for the register, Kecal, upright, as the one accent. The system consolidated into _tokens.css, _pairings.css, _styleguide.js; the permutation sheet keeps every pairing.

Five directions emerged from doodling. One stood out.

To differentiate the brand of OpenProse from pure vibe-coded competitors, I returned to my roots: drawing by hand, then rebuilding in vector. Now with a modern twist: I used Arrow, an SVG-generating LLM from QuiverAI, to help fill in details and explore alternates.

Five families emerged and one seemed to call out more than the others. The logo family called Style was forwarded as a candidate for canonical mark. Click below to cycle the logo concepts.

The living specimen · click to cycle infinite → style → circle → swish → cursive.

Click to expand

The field of studies the five families were distilled from, clustered by idea. Click to expand.

Make the page feel alive.

Aiming to become more interactive: a surface that responds.

I went in a handful of directions, different metaphors. Cellular automata were interesting; then, as I made UI to mess with the parameters, I found settings that evoked ripples and water.

While I was working on this project over the two months, I went on a quick vacation to La Paz, where I swam with a Whale Shark for the first time. As a palette cleanser, with the power of Arrow letting me generate clean SVGs from images plus some manual touchups, the little Whale Shark was born, combined with him eating the cellular automata.

From there I went into trying black hole motifs: pure vibe-coded 2D versions alongside a port of vlwkaos/threejs-blackhole.

A fun idea, but ultimately just a moment of creative madness that helped me transition back into refining the cellular automata style.

The automata were alive but abstract, and thus also possible for others to generate. The search for unique texture led back to my oldest medium, photography, and one motif held through the search: the bloom and its ripples. I started by simply putting photographs in place of whitespace, but it became clear that I had to try combining the interactive elements with photography, something I have found myself doing as an artist, here in its most advanced form.

The Sierra Nevada series.

1. 01 · the photographreal mountain, real reflection. When WebGL is unavailable it shows.
2. 02 · the cloudsthe procedural pass, rendered alone: an FBM cloud field lit from the upper left.
3. 03 · the ripplesgaussian ring displacement plus ambient shimmer, raindrop randomness and larger response to the cursor.
4. 04 · the maskthe mountain with its sky cut away by hand.

// reflection registration · dialed by hand, then baked (_reflection-tuner.md)
axis 0.505   shorten 1.012   shiftX 0.000   scaleX 0.990
tilt −0.004   axisTilt −0.009   keystone 0.000
// cloud-clear brush · 96² persistent mask · radius 0.13 · strength 0.55 · 7s return

I wanted to make something that would stand out from the increasingly crowded field of design in the generative age. The real photograph hangs printed above my monitor, its ripples frozen except in memory; on the monitor below, they move.

A reminder of how far technology has come; of all that will change, and all that will stay the same.

Everything above settled into a style.

Thirty-seven approaches, five families, and a chain of heroes distill into the canonical set: the homepage concept, the permutation sheet, and the styleguide that pins the defaults, with the aspect catalog beside them showing the different aspects of this style landscape. The catalog is a way to explore alternatives and play with the best feeling. The 'canonical' style and page represent crystallizations of the possibilities into some ideal candidates.