Visual language
Southern Gothic
Heat haze, peeling paint, kudzu, sun-bleached palette, humid low contrast
Delta gothic · humid decay
The contrast readout
The colour rule in the record asks for deliberately low contrast, sun-bleached. So the page measures itself. These are the text-to-ground ratios of the CSS you are looking at:
| Pair | Values | Measured | Standing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display signage (the name above, the section marks) | #B3A78A on #E7E0CC | 1.81:1 | deliberately low — the humidity |
| Display support lines (aliases, sign footers) | #9C8F6F on #E7E0CC | 2.42:1 | deliberately low |
| Reading matter on plain panels | #453F2E on #F1ECDD | 8.88:1 | AA held |
| Secondary reading matter on panels | #5F5945 on #F1ECDD | 5.92:1 | AA held |
| Cold demonstration panel (the parent, staged) | #DDE1E6 on #15171C | 13.65:1 | raised — the parent’s register |
| Hot demonstration panel (this page, staged) | #ABA083 on #E4DDC6 | 1.91:1 | deliberately low |
The signage and the hot demonstration run low. Everything meant to be read sits on a plain panel like this one, at 4.5:1 or better, and keyboard focus always gets the full-ink ring.
The lettering is signage
The record holds no typeface guidance. This page letters its signs as weathered vernacular signage (hand-set, sun-eaten, commercial) in Eczar. The painted board sets the record's own aliases in it.
One borrow is refused outright. The parent's display face is blackletter, and the parent's record carries a cultural-load warning on it. Southern Gothic has no token rule of its own, and the brief's instruction is explicit: do not borrow the blackletter. No glyph of it appears in this page.
The same words, staged cold and staged hot
The record names the failures exactly: fog, stone, or raised contrast, and this register reverts to its parent. So the demonstration stages the record's own frozen line twice, identically worded, and changes only the climate.
Southern Gothic
Heat and decay rather than fog and stone
Southern Gothic
Heat and decay rather than fog and stone
Where it stops
- Gothic Horror
- The parent: the cold staging above.
- Western
- Shares the sun-bleached palette. Western is a live record under cultural protocol — the brief compares on climate only, and so does this page.
What the humidity refuses
- No fog or mist.
- No stone architecture.
- No high contrast or deep vignette.
- No blackletter.
- No night as the primary condition.
The record's avoidance list, complete.