Labs

Atmosphere

The raster/painterly atmosphere layer — full-bleed hero imagery (Gemini, per ADR-014), a CSS halftone-corner accent, and a dust-speck flourish, composited behind real Nav, hero type, mark, and cards. Only one value here is a systematic token: background opacity (effect.atmosphere.opacity--atmosphere-opacity, dark 0.6 / light 0 — the light-mode kill switch). Every other dial is live, art-directed, and lab-local: tuned by eye, not locked.

Caveat (2026-07-18): the four tiles are round-1 draft comparison art, generated to answer "atmosphere vs. grid" and "hero-only vs. full-bleed" — not final assets. Tiles 2 and 4 are the finalists; the call between them (and whether "hero-only, fades to flat" becomes a structural rule at all) waits on real Phase 6 page content that doesn't exist yet. Nothing on this page is locked but the one opacity token.

Preview

Preview theme

Portfolio — technical spike

Tony Walt

Designer/engineer working across brand systems, motion, and product interfaces. This composite is the review stage for the atmosphere layer — real chrome, real type, real cards, sitting on the generated hero art.

Selected work

Rebuilding a design system's motion language

A token-first pass at duration, easing, and signature interaction behaviors — built as a standalone tuning lab before being ported into the production site.

View the motion lab →

Selected work

Kite: a design system for 40+ teams

Built and scaled the token pipeline, component library, and governance model that let five orgs ship consistent product without a central bottleneck.

Read the case study →

Labs

Two years of internal AI experiments, published

From a two-agent prototype to a sixteen-agent internal practice — the backlog of talks, workshops, and prototypes that never made it public until now.

Browse the labs →
1 · Background

Which style tile, and how strong. Opacity is the one token-backed dial — it previews --atmosphere-opacity's dark value on the stage; in light the token's own 0 takes over and the whole atmosphere is killed.

Style tile

Style tile
Tiles 2 and 4 are the finalists (imagery-prompts.md). Tile 2 read too pronounced at full strength in review — that's a prompt-side fix next round, not a permanent CSS cap, so it's left to this dial here.
2 · Dust flourish

Lab-local. A few small blurred specks drifting on a slow ambient loop (CSS-only, transform/opacity). Its easing references the --ease-ambient motion token; reduced-motion disables the loop.

Dust
3 · Halftone corner

Lab-local. A tight top-right dot-matrix accent (CSS radial-gradient grid + radial mask — a precise repeating pattern, vector-native, not atmosphere). Its color already reads var(--color-accent); the geometry is what's tunable.

Halftone