01/ The brief
A client came to us with 40 years of shipping manifests and a terminal in the back of a cargo hold. The screen is 96 columns wide, amber-burned, and the only input device is a keyboard missing its arrow keys. They wanted a dashboard.
So we drew one. Every rule you see is a real U+2500 stretched to fill its container; every corner is a real character sitting on top of it. The layout is a grid of character cells, which means it reflows the way text reflows, and it prints.
- Engagement
- Interface system + type spec
- Grid
- 96 columns × 1.55 line-height
- Assets shipped
- 0 images / 0 icons / 0 fonts
- Payload
- 11.4 KB gzipped
- Fallback
- degrades to plain text
02/ Live character renderer
A torus, ray-marched per character cell and quantised against a luminance ramp. This is the whole point of the studio: shapes made of letters, updated at 30 frames a second, weighing nothing.
Reduced-motion visitors receive a single static frame instead of the loop.
03/ Where the bytes went
Payload comparison against the four previous versions of the same dashboard. Bars are drawn in eighth-block characters, so partial values land mid-cell.
| Build | KB |
|---|---|
| v1 · flash | 2840 |
| v2 · jquery | 1120 |
| v3 · spa | 640 |
| v4 · static | 96 |
| v5 · glyph | 11 |
04/ The glyph set
The nine codepoints that do ninety percent of the work. Hover a row to lift it.
| Glyph | Codepoint | Name | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ─ | U+2500 | light horizontal | 1,204 |
| │ | U+2502 | light vertical | 988 |
| ┌ | U+250C | down and right | 62 |
| ┐ | U+2510 | down and left | 62 |
| └ | U+2514 | up and right | 62 |
| ┤ | U+2524 | vertical and left | 41 |
| ╔ | U+2554 | double down/right | 7 |
| █ | U+2588 | full block | 3,110 |
| ▒ | U+2592 | medium shade | 842 |
05/ Build stream
tailing · nine lines retained
06/ Rates
- Glyph audit
- £2,400 · one week · a written spec and a working frame component
- Full interface
- £14,000 · six weeks · tokens, components, motion, print sheet
- Retainer
- £3,100/mo · two days a month, indefinitely
- Availability
- Q4 2026 · two slots