A paper-wasp nest whose hexagonal comb is not drawn but grown — a real stigmergy simulation tessellating outward inside CSS-3D paper shells you can turn. Here is the reasoning behind the palette, the type, and the build.
VESPIARY is a fictional field-observatory for paper wasps. Its single job is to make one idea felt in the body: that a perfectly ordered structure can emerge from thousands of tiny, local decisions with no plan and no planner. The comb you watch above is a genuine stigmergy simulation — each hexagon is added where the existing walls invite it most strongly — wrapped in a swirled paper envelope you can orbit in 3D. The audience is anyone who likes to see order arrive on its own.
The nest is literally the weathered timber it was chewed from, so the palette is all pulp and shadow — no colour the wasp couldn't make. The one bright note, wasp gold, is reserved for lines and the freshest working edge, never for small body text.
Contrast note: the concept's gold is a marks colour. Body and secondary text run on the dedicated ink tokens (#EDE4D2 / #C4B6A0), both clearing 4.5:1 on the dark ground — the recurring gold-on-texture failure from earlier waves is designed out.
A soft, slightly wonky old-style serif. Its SOFT and WONK axes give the big italics a hand-chewed, organic wobble that suits paper made by mouth. Optical size is pushed to 144 on headlines so the ball terminals read at scale.
A grotesque with a tall x-height and even colour. It holds the eyebrows, controls, and readouts at small sizes with wide tracking, letting the serif carry all the personality.
The typographic bravery is the centre pull-quote — a 16-character-wide slab of Fraunces italic at its softest, wonkiest setting, so the sentence itself looks pulped.
No WebGL and no 3D library — the nest is pure CSS 3D. Two nested paper shells are each a barrel of ~22 flat facets, placed with rotateY(i·16.4°) translateZ(R), plus a tilted crown ring and a petiole stalk. Per-facet brightness() is computed from each facet's angle to the camera, so the paper self-shades into a rounded form as one rotateX/rotateY on the parent turntable orbits the whole assembly. The front facets are omitted to tear open an aperture onto the comb, and facets are revealed back-to-front as the colony grows, so new bands of pulp visibly wrap the nest.
Inside the shells sits a 2D canvas running the real simulation. The comb is an axial hex grid. A frontier of empty cells adjacent to built ones is scored by (built-neighbour count)^2.2 · e^(−0.16·ring) — a genuine stigmergic rule: a pocket already bounded by three walls is a far louder building cue than one bounded by one, and the mild radial term keeps the growth round. Each tick picks a frontier cell by weighted-random draw and lays pulp; the cell animates in from a wet gold to dried grey over ~1.1s while five wasp builders track to the freshest edge. Nothing is scripted or looped — reseed and it tessellates a different, valid comb every time.
document.hidden, delta clamped on resume, reduced-motion renders a fully-settled comb with no spin.opsz to 144 on the hero so terminals resolve; headlines were reading flat at the default optical size.ease-out feel.scrollWidth).