Specification — not client-facing
V7 — Polder
Thesis: the Dutch landscape as design system — horizontal strata (sky / dike / field / water) structure every page, a NAP datum line annotates each section's elevation, parcel-strip grids carry content, and the quality system is the pump that keeps the polder dry. The page literally descends below sea level as you scroll, ending at −6.76 m — the real lowest point of the Netherlands. Deep-Dutch identity without a square inch of De Stijl cliché.
One of ten competing design variants; content identical across all ten (see website/variants/content.md).
The system
Specification
Sky #EBF2F3/#DCE9EB · field #EDF3E4/#E2ECD2 · dike #00512E (the 180-green, structural) · water #10333D · ink #182620. Color is elevation: the darker the band, the lower you are. Amber hatch only in "not yet reclaimed" chips.
Bricolage Grotesque 400/600/800 (earthy, chunky display and body) + Spline Sans Mono 400/600 (NAP annotations, parcel numbers, survey labels).
Every section is a stratum opening with the NAP datum line stating its elevation. Services are six parcel strips with dashed cadastral dividers; the timeline is a reclamation sequence (survey → dike → pumping → dry land); the team is het waterschap — the water board.
Exactly what really moves in a polder, nothing else: the pump's sails turn and the waterline drifts (both CSS, both reduced-motion-gated). No entrance reveals — land does not animate.
Placeholders are "not yet reclaimed" hatched plots; the survey-marker facts row states that markers are never guessed; the −6.76 m footer datum is a true geographic fact (Zuidplaspolder), used as geography, not as an org claim.
Method & extension
How it was made, and how to extend it
Build: hand-written static HTML/CSS, one stylesheet, no framework, zero JavaScript, no raster images — the dike section, survey map, and pump are inline SVG. ~192 KB of self-hosted woff2 is the asset budget.
Mood calibration: waterschap cartography, cadastral maps, and the visual calm of the flat horizon — the stratum is the hero. The rule when extending: every new section must declare its elevation, and the page must always end in water.
To extend: Our Work becomes reclaimed parcels (one case per parcel, its outcome as the crop); Impact is the day the survey markers get real numbers; About is the history of the polder. Never stack two strata of the same band; never let anything float free of a stratum.
Deploy: consolidated Cloudflare Pages tree via tools/deploy-cf.ps1.
Critique & revision log
Rounds
Stage 0 — initial construction. Built from the shared content spec with all accumulated lessons applied: no entrance motion (only the pump and the water move), no card walls (parcels are a cadastral form), plain controls, no cross-page duplication beyond the six parcels which each page frames differently, one placeholder register, correct field counts, semantic color (elevation). Awaiting Critic round 1.