05 / Design note Why a workbench.
The other studies in this set treat the portfolio as a poster, an
instrument, or a notebook. This one treats it as a place where things
are actually made: a bench with tools on the wall, drawers that pull
open, and a ledger beside it recording what was built and when.
The palette comes from that workshop. Warm paper is the ground, because
a ledger is paper before it is a screen. Graphite carries the structure.
Safety orange is reserved for the one live thing in each view — the
accent word, the peak month, the handle of the vise. Technical blue is
used only for measurement: callouts, dimension lines, provenance
labels.
The bench drawing in the hero is original inline SVG, drawn for this
page and annotated like a shop drawing. Its callouts deliberately point
at real counts rather than decorative detail, and the caption says so.
Filtering hides nothing that cannot be reached without it: every drawer
is present in the markup, the controls are ordinary buttons with aria-pressed, and the bench notes use native <details> so they work with no JavaScript at all.
Same substance as the rest of the site. Another way of handling it.
The mood board collects the other directions, and the original homepage
is still there if you prefer it straight.
- Grounding
Paper, hairlines and a graph grid — a surface to work on rather than a backdrop.
- Measurement
Mono numerals for anything countable, with the source of each figure named.
- Access
Real buttons, native disclosure, visible focus, and no reliance on hover or motion.
- Honesty
Illustrative drawings are labelled as such. Counts come from the data files, not from copywriting.