ARANEA is a fictional orb-weaver vivarium — a single-screen exhibit whose one job is to make you sit still and watch a garden spider build a whole orb web, live, then feel prey strike the silk. The web is real geometry drawn in SVG; the tremor is a real mass-spring simulation with a canvas layer for silk shimmer and dew.
The contrast rule this collection keeps re-learning
Bright accents belong on lines, not small text over busy fields. Here the field is dark, so dew silver doubles safely as ink; secondary copy gets its own muted token (#9FB0AA, ~7:1) and hairlines get a fainter one (#6E7C77) that never carries words.
A soft, high-contrast old-style with an optical-size axis and a wonky italic. Set large it feels handmade and organic — the right voice for a living thing. Used for the wordmark, every headline, numerals, and the italic captions that narrate the build.
A humanist sans with tabular figures for the readout and stats. It stays quiet and legible at 10–15px so the serif and the silk do the talking. Tracked-out uppercase for labels and eyebrows.
The signature: watch her spin it, then feel the pluck
When a mote drifts into the capture band, the loop finds the nearest lattice node and kicks its Verlet velocity mostly perpendicular to the radial. The impulse ripples outward through the neighbour springs — the whole SVG web visibly bends and recovers while the canvas shimmer flares along the ringing threads. At the same instant the spider reads which node was struck and runs the exact radial to it, pauses over the catch, and returns to the hub head-down. Toss a mote — or click anywhere on the silk — and the entire read-and-run happens in under a heartbeat.