Brand direction explorations for corbet.ch

Direction A / B / C

Three palette variants on a single Swiss-grid composition. Same typeface, same copy. Tests warm-vs-cold and red-vs-green at a glance.

Editorial dark

One fully-composed modern direction. Dark, asymmetric, mixed-weight Geist with a static connection-graph hero. Different paradigm, not a palette swap.

Animated network

Study 2 with the connection graph alive. Svelte 5 island: nodes drift, edges fade in and out by proximity, the constellation is pulled toward the cursor. Hover the hero.

Modern with restraint — a middle

The merge. Study 3 architecture and animation, but with a cinnabar accent instead of chartreuse, slower drift, weaker cursor pull, tighter detail. Modern bones, noble surface — aiming at strategy/politics/finance without the AI-startup signal.

Editorial serif — thinker who writes

A different paradigm. Light cream paper, Fraunces serif display, Geist body, narrow column, long-form lead with a dropcap. Magazine register. Says I write, I think, I publish — without leaning techy.

Single statement — one sentence

Radical minimalism. One hand-broken sentence above the fold, one tight line below, nothing else. Silence instead of motion. Confidence as restraint — risky to land, very strong if it does.

Running mate — background theater

Persistent particle network as background. Spontaneous pulses create temporary dense clusters with brighter edges — visible 'thinking moments.' Icons (bulb, knight, plus, question, eye, compass, cog, rook, hourglass, lightning, diamond) occasionally emerge from the mesh, hold, dissolve back. Slogan center.

Volks-typo · Dark manifesto

Bauhaus / Constructivist register. Cormorant Garamond display + Inter body + JetBrains Mono labels. Charcoal ground with off-white ink and blood-red accent. Four numbered principles (independence · discretion · patience with ambiguity · a different frame). Manifesto register.

Running mate (classical) — Cormorant over the network

Snapshot of Study 7's classical-register pass: Cormorant Garamond cream display, blood-red italic counterpoint, Cormorant + Inter + JetBrains Mono unified with Study 8. Preserved as a sibling because the literary-editorial register is its own thing — separate from Study 7's friendlier Apple direction.

Streaming response — typed like an LLM

Slogan + body type themselves out character-by-character on page load, with a blinking caret and variable per-char delay so the rhythm reads as real LLM streaming. No backend — the page just stages the gesture. Show-don’t-tell AI register without exposing a live chat surface.

System prompt — the voice is the prompt

Page styled as a faux Anthropic API request. Mono throughout, JSON-shaped, syntax-tinted. The visible "system" field is Julian’s positioning rendered as a prompt. Meta-transparent: here’s the prompt that defines me — go run it yourself. Static, no JS animation, no abuse surface.

Embedding space — clustered domains

Particles partition into four named clusters (STRATEGY, AI, POLITICS, ADVISORY) with within-cluster connections only. Reads as a t-SNE / embedding visualisation of Julian’s domain mix. Slogan centred over the map. Suggests "the mind as embedding space" without any model behind it.

Bauhaus shapes — green disc + monumental type

Crossover of 01 + 08 + green. Bold geometric forms (filled emerald disc, white rotated square ornament) as visual punctuation alongside Cormorant Garamond headline + three numbered working-register principles. Poster register: Müller-Brockmann territory. Static, high contrast, no animation.

Streaming Cormorant — type that types itself

Crossover of 10 + 08 + green. Slogan + body type themselves out character-by-character (LLM-streaming gesture from 10), but in Cormorant Garamond display + green italic counterpoint (typography from 08). Classical register that performs as if generating itself.

Whisper network — statement + quiet green mesh

Crossover of 06 + 03 + green. Hand-broken Cormorant statement over the original ConnectionGraph component (lighter than MorphNetwork) tuned to a low count of green particles. The network is barely-there atmospheric life behind the type — present, but not the centre of attention.

CRT terminal — phosphor green mainframe

Page rendered as if on a 1970s amber-on-black mainframe. Bright phosphor green, JetBrains Mono throughout, scanline overlay, subtle text-shadow glow, faux INCOMING-feed structure with timestamps and dimmer ancillary lines. Slogan is the transmission. Connects "AI" to its mainframe heritage. Green is finally native to the form.

Iterating headline — a thinker working a question

Massive Cormorant headline crossfades through four framings of the same insight ("The world is changing." → "The maps are aging." → "The questions are outpacing the answers." → "The frame matters more than the answer."). Each held ~5s, slow opacity + blur transition. Stable green italic counter-line anchors the rotation beneath. Reads as someone iterating on a thought in real time, not a SaaS hero rotator.

Meditative cycle — slower, right-aligned, deeper green

Variation of 17. Same mechanic, dialed down: right-aligned typography (asymmetric weight), ~7s hold per framing (slower), deeper green (#15803D emerald-700 instead of brighter emerald-600), no body paragraph. Pure typographic — the page IS the cycle. More breath, more weight per framing.

Paired dialogue — two voices in conversation

Variation of 17. BOTH lines cycle — the lead reframes the situation, the green echo qualifies or asks what would help. The echo lags the lead by ~180ms so the answer arrives after the question, like a real beat. Reads as a thinker in dialogue with themselves, not a monologue.

Thought set — four framings, one active

Variation of 17. All four phrases visible at once in a numbered stack (01, 02, 03, 04). The active row is bright Cormorant with a green marker; the others dim back to neutral-600. Active rotates every ~4s. Reads as browsing a curated thought set rather than passively watching it appear — more catalogue than slideshow.

Blueprint — measured drawing

An idea rendered as an architect's measured drawing. Inline SVG: a faint green construction grid, an exploded-axonometric wireframe of stacked planes in thin emerald strokes, dimension lines with arrow terminators and mono measurements, a circled detail bug on a leader, and a real title block bottom-right — DRAWN BY: J. CORBET / SCALE 1:1 / SHEET 01. The slogan is the sheet's title; the thought is drawn to scale. One iso-edge dimension measures itself in once. A new orthographic register.

Cartographic contour — the maps are aging

'The maps are aging' taken literally — a strategic topographic survey on charcoal. Nested hand-surveyed contour rings, a faint coordinate graticule, a north arrow and scale bar, and a dashed route crossing the terrain to a horizon waypoint. A single emerald accent on the route and one index contour; the slogan sits in the cartouche. Continuous cartography, not a point-cloud network.

Risograph — halftone overprint

A printed-poster register that lives on charcoal, not cream. The slogan is screened behind a coarse halftone field and overprinted twice — a warm-ink plate and a green plate offset ~4px with a screen blend — so the plates never quite register, and the slip is the point. Paper grain via feTurbulence; a registration crosshair and a two-swatch ink bar close the colophon. Tactile, hand-made, anti-corporate.

Kinetic variable-weight — a line being weighed

One monumental line, 'The world is changing.', held still and weighed — only its weight moves, breathing from 340 to 640 on a slow ease-in-out loop through Fraunces' variable axes. No text swap, no type-out: emphasis rising and settling like a considered mind testing a claim. The green italic question sits beneath, static. A new motion register — it animates an axis, not the words.

Frontispiece — front matter & contents

The page as the front matter of a slim strategy memo, not a hero. A running head, a title block setting the slogan as the work’s title with the green italic question as subtitle, then a real printed table of contents — five numbered questions with leader dots running to mono folios — closed by a typographer’s colophon. Document-as-page: a structural register distinct from every hero-as-page study.

Long-shadow chiaroscuro — one lit form

A new light/shadow register. A single architectural slab under raking light, its lit face fading to a near-black shadowed face (layered CSS gradients), throwing one long, soft, skewed shadow across the charcoal. The only colour is a 2px thread of green edge-light at the lit corner; the slogan sits where the light falls. Chiaroscuro, not a tech-demo — photographic and quiet, with a very slow ~36s light drift.

Light follows the cursor — reactive chiaroscuro

Reactive evolution of 26. The raking light tracks your pointer — a rAF loop lerps a virtual light toward the cursor (or, with none, a slow ~44s ambient orbit) and resolves the slab's lit→shadow face gradient, the long cast shadow's swing and length, the green edge-light's corner, and the ambient wash, all in real time. Nothing is ever drawn at the cursor; only the light it implies moves. The sun crosses the monolith, the shadow answers.

Attention-weight under the cursor

Reactive evolution of 24. 'The world is changing.' is split to per-letter Fraunces spans whose weight is driven by distance to the cursor — type thickens where attention falls and thins with distance, a smooth weight gradient that tracks the reader along the line. No halo, no marker: the cursor moves the medium, not a decoration. With no pointer a slow eased wave of weight sweeps the line on its own; reduced-motion settles to an even mid-weight.

Curl-noise flow field — a current you can part

A divergence-free curl-noise current (simplex-noise) drifts hairline streamlines across a full-bleed canvas, flowing on its own. Move through it and the field parts around an invisible local force — gentle repulsion plus a touch of swirl — then closes again behind: a medium that answers to the hand without ever pointing back at it. Sparse green-tinted hairlines on charcoal; one rAF loop, DPR-capped, visibility-paused, a single still frame under reduced motion. The slogan holds steady over the flow.

Cursor-parallax depth — a view with footing

A receding survey of vertical strata — five depth planes whose marks shift by their own depth weight as a cursor-steered 'camera' pans, so the page reads as looking through a changing world rather than at a flat picture. Inverted, lerped parallax over a perpetual incommensurate Lissajous drift, so the scene breathes at rest and on touch with no cursor at all (tilt-aware on phones). Aerial blur softens the far planes; one near edge carries the single emerald light.

Risograph — reactive registration

Reactive evolution of 23. The two-ink overprint slip is now yours to work: the green plate’s offset from the warm-ink bed is driven by the pointer (a small bounded translate + tiny rotation), the halftone screen and counter-line taking a reduced share so the whole impression mis-registers as one pull. Move and the plates part; rest and the press breathes on a slow autonomous wobble; reduced-motion settles to the frozen Study-23 slip. Even the colophon registration mark shows the live offset.

Vector field · needles — a lattice that turns

A fixed lattice of short, uniform-length compass needles over charcoal — the field drawn as itself, not advected along (the counterpoint to 29). Each needle is anchored to its grid point and only rotates, reading a slow curl-noise direction field, so the whole grid swings at rest like a tide. Pass through and the field curls around an invisible vortex: nearby needles swirl tangentially to your presence, tinting green, then ease back. Direction, not magnitude.

Vector field · quiver — strength & direction

An interactive scientific quiver plot: a fixed grid of small arrows, each turned to the field’s direction and scaled in length, opacity and ink→green intensity by its magnitude, so you read at a glance where the field runs strong or slack. The lattice breathes and re-routes at rest; rest your attention anywhere and the nearby needles swing to face it, like compasses to a pole. A field with strength and direction — and you are a pole in it.