A manuscript written too small to read, and a glass of your own to read it with. Move the lens and the ink stands up, the margins confess their secrets, and the dragon in the first letter opens one eye.
VELLUM is a single illuminated leaf from a fictional bestiary, De Dracone Dormiente, set in a hand no wider than a hair. It is inert until you drive it: the whole reveal rides a magnifying glass fixed to your cursor. This is Wave 4 — Second Person — so the leaf is addressed to you, and it cannot be read except through the small circle of warmth you carry across it.
Audience: anyone who has ever leaned closer to a thing to understand it. The page's single job — make reading feel like an act of searching, one word at a time, with everything else waiting patiently in the dark.
A real medieval leaf is warm, not white; ink is gall-brown, not black; the costly colours — lapis and gold — are spent only on the sacred and the ornamental. The palette follows those economics exactly, and reserves the bright accents for marks and lines, never small text.
A scholarly humanist serif built for medievalists, with the ligatures and even colour that survive being set at 7px. It is the manuscript's own hand — quiet, dense, and legible under the glass.
A high-contrast Garamond descendant with dramatic thin strokes. It carries the wordmark, the rubrics, and the great gold initial — the leaf's one moment of typographic bravery.
The bravery is the near-illegible body itself: setting real, careful prose at ~7px and trusting the glass to make it a pleasure rather than a strain.
The base leaf is real DOM text — accessible, selectable, and fully readable if the script never runs. On load the script wraps every word in a span and measures its exact position, size and colour with getBoundingClientRect, building a model of the page in leaf-local coordinates.
Each frame the glass renders that model afresh into an off-screen rich canvas, magnified 2.6× around the cursor — so the enlarged text is drawn crisp from vectors, not sampled and blurred from the tiny original. That buffer is then pushed through a precomputed barrel-distortion map: a per-pixel lookup that bulges the centre and pinches the rim like real ground glass, with a faint chromatic fringe at the edge. A brass bezel, a specular crescent, and a soft cast shadow finish the loupe.
Because the glass redraws its own enriched layer, it can show what the base leaf does not: interlinear glosses, a pointing manicule, a hare with a sword, the scribe's muttered complaint — and, coiled in the initial Y, a dragon. A heat value rises while the lens rests on him and decays when you move away; his eye opens, his jaw glows, gold studs brighten along his spine and a thread of smoke climbs the ascender. The glass is a small sun, and heat is the one word he answers to.
No libraries. Canvas 2D and SVG filters only. DPR capped at 2; the warp runs at a fixed internal resolution so cost stays bounded; the loop pauses when the tab is hidden and sleeps when the glass is still. Reduced-motion parks the glass over the initial with the dragon awake but breathless, and lets your pointer drive single frames with no ambient animation. Keyboard users move the glass with the arrow keys.
Designed & built by Sapience Analytics — part of the Generative Assets collection. A page you can only read through the glass you carry.