Guide · How it was made
A corrosion observatory. The single job of the page is to make one slow, invisible process — iron oxidising — watchable: a mild-steel coupon rusts across compressed decades while a live front consumes the bright metal. Everything else on the page stays quiet so the plate can speak.
The plate is a bistable reaction–diffusion field solved on a canvas grid — an Allen–Cahn front. Every cell holds one scalar φ that is either metal (0) or rust (1); the only stable states are those two, and diffusion drags the boundary between them into fresh steel. Corrosion is nucleated at the coupon's scratches (φ = 1) and propagates outward as a filled, blooming front, not a stain.
A per-cell threshold a, drawn from a smoothed noise field, makes the front ragged and organic: where the metal is tougher the boundary crawls, stranding bright islands that hold out before they too are taken — the page's second-read detail. The reaction–diffusion micro-structure is deliberately not rendered raw (it reads as circuitry); instead the φ field is lightly blurred into a filled rust body, aged from a hot corrosion edge to spent dark oxide, mottled by the same noise. The brushed-steel base, its diagonal sheen and the four corner rivets are drawn procedurally — no raster images anywhere. A live counter reads percent corroded and elapsed years; the field loops from clean to consumed on roughly a 24-second cycle (~200 compressed years).
Argued entirely from the subject: cold rolled steel, the iron beneath it, and the oxide it becomes. The bright corrosion is reserved for marks and the active front; small text runs on a lightened steel ink so body copy clears 4.5:1 over the dark ground.
A heavy, wide industrial grotesque for the wordmark and headings — it reads like stamped steel stock, broad and load-bearing. Set uppercase with tight tracking so the display feels machined, not decorative.
Every readout, label and datum is monospaced with tabular figures so the climbing counters hold their place and the page reads as an instrument, not a brochure. Body copy runs in Archivo regular for calm legibility.
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