The visual identity is split by medium, because each renderer should play to its strength.
| lane | styles | tool | why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Graphic | risograph, inkwash, animated, editorial |
hand-authored SVG, spec-driven, in-engine | vector excels at flat color, screentone, type, schematic clarity, and deterministic reproducibility |
| Hero anime | the cinematic key visual | image generation (NijiJourney 6), prompted by animePrompt(d) |
character-grade anime has a hard ceiling in hand-coded bezier; an anime-specialised model is the right tool |
| The experience | the two deployed chapters | scripts/_design.ts — the white room |
a reader making a decision needs a diagram, not a mood |
The engine produces SVG for the graphic lane and a prompt for the hero lane — same spec, two outputs.
The Shinkai dusk below governs the renderers and the hero prompts. It does not govern the deployed chapters, and that separation is deliberate.
The trolley problem was published in 1967 as a diagram; the melodrama came later. A saturated dusk with god-rays and a bloom on impact makes five deaths look like a film still, and the reader gets to feel something instead of decide something. The white room refuses that trade: near-white ground, one uninterrupted sheet, New York for the fiction and SF Pro for the interface, and greyscale everywhere except a single signal colour that belongs to the hazard and to nothing else.
Two things carry over rather than being invented twice:
- The accent is
CORAL #D85A30/CORALDARK #993C1D, taken fromsrc/render/editorial.ts— so the library's own renderer and the deployed pages share one accent by construction. - A person is the
person()glyph from the same file: head, rounded shoulders, no face. Chapter two's rule — a hierarchy of lives, never a face — now applies to both chapters and to the editorial renderer alike.
Death is drawn, never faded: the glyph's fill drops out and leaves an outline, present and empty and exactly where it was, and one line is struck through the group's baseline. Fading a party out on white would let them dissolve into the paper, which is the aestheticization the lane exists to avoid.
Decided after a four-hand comparison (Shinkai·Tanaka / CLAMP / Amano / Ghibli):
- World + light: Makoto Shinkai / CoMix Wave Films. Saturated dusk skies (indigo → magenta → gold), god rays, lens flare, volumetric backlight, rim-lit figures, melancholic atmosphere. This is the look the project was anchored on from the start.
- Character design: Masayoshi Tanaka (Shinkai's own designer — your name, Weathering With You). Clean, modern, ~7.5-head proportions, expressive but grounded. Chosen for coherence with the lighting and the yearning register the dilemma wants.
- Do not blend hands. A blended figure reads as the soulless "anime average." Reference one hand and commit. CLAMP's elongated fate-coded look is reserved for occasional special-edition covers, not the house style.
The Shinkai dusk gradient and the figure values, as used by the renderers:
sky indigo #2b2a55 → violet #6b4f86 → rose #c75f81 → amber #ef9a5a → gold #f7c873
figure core #241B38 (never pure black) ; ambient plane #4A4660 ; core shadow #15101F
rim transition #FFB259 → saturated #FF8A3D / #FFC27A → white-hot cap #FFF0C8
bounce cool teal #3E5A6B with a #5B8299 edge sliver
lit face #CB9A82 ; catchlight #FFF6E8
animePrompt(d) returns { prompt, negative, niji, aspect }, driven by the spec:
- domain swaps the apparatus + setting (rail → switch lever; hospital → scalpel; road → steering wheel; datacenter → kill-switch; lifeboat → davit rope) — the engine's way of saying it was never about trains.
- count sets the crowd in danger.
- derived causation sets the protagonist's emotion:
means→ anguish (using a person as a tool);side_effect→ tragic resolve.
import { animePrompt, footbridge } from "@switchyard/core";
console.log(animePrompt(footbridge).niji); // paste into NijiJourney 6Standing negative prompt: extra fingers, deformed hands, mutated, lowres, blurry, western cartoon, 3d render, photorealistic, watermark, text, flat lighting, oversaturated, chibi.