Drawn, not photographed.
Every plate on this walk is a screen-printed illustration in the estate palette. That is partly an aesthetic decision and mostly an honest one: we do not have licensed photographs of this farm and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Why an illustration rather than a photograph.
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Because we do not have the photographs.
This is an unofficial demonstration build. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or authorised by any of the businesses it describes, and it therefore has no licensed photography of any of them.
The options were stock images of a different farm, scraped images we have no right to, or drawing it. Only one of those is defensible and it is also, as it turns out, the one that looks best.
A screen-printed plate cannot be mistaken for evidence. A stock photograph of somebody else’s farm can.
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Because a plate weighs four kilobytes and a photograph does not.
Each plate is an SVG. It scales to any screen without a second file, it is a few kilobytes, and it stays sharp on a display we have not thought about yet.
On a 3G connection in a queue — which is where a great deal of this will be read — that is the difference between a walk and a wait.
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Because it can be drawn four times.
Every stop exists in a spring, summer, autumn and winter version. Photographing that would mean four visits a year, for years, in the right light, with permission.
Drawing it means the site can follow the real season at OX7 without anybody scheduling a shoot, and it means February gets the same care as August rather than being represented by a summer picture with a colder caption.
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And because it never claims to be more than it is.
A plate is obviously a drawing. Nobody looks at one and believes they have seen the actual field, which means it can illustrate a page without doing the work of evidence.
Where this build shows something as fact, the fact is in the words and the source is named. The pictures are there to make a page readable, not to prove anything.
The words carry the claims. The plates carry the reading.
The plate system.
Each plate
- Format
- SVGVector, so it scales without a second file.
- Weight
- About 4 to 40 KBAgainst several hundred for a photograph.
- Seasonal versions
- FourSpring, summer, autumn, winter.
- Palette
- The estate paletteWhich itself shifts with the season.
- Alt text
- Written per plateA description, not a file name.
If a photograph arrives
- Drop-in replacement
- YesA cleared photograph named for the plate replaces it everywhere.
- Where it appears
- Hero, card, gallery, social imageWith no content edit anywhere.
- Manifest
- One text fileWhich is the whole mechanism.
- Until then
- The plateAnd it says so, here, rather than nowhere.
The theme carries a manifest for cleared photography. If a licensed image of a stop ever exists, it replaces the plate everywhere it appears without a single word on this walk changing.
Twelve stops, twelve plates.
The scrubbing, and why it is not a video.
The opening sequence is twelve still plates advanced by your scroll position. It is not a video and there is nothing playing.
That matters for three reasons. You control it, so it cannot run away from you. It costs a fraction of what a video costs to deliver. And under a reduced-motion preference it collapses to one plate and a caption, which is a storyboard rather than a broken video player.
Storyboards are how the programme itself is planned. Making that the accessible fallback rather than an apology for one is the single decision on this walk we are most pleased with.
In short.
Drawn
Because there is no licensed photography and we say so.
Four kilobytes
Against several hundred for a photograph.
Four versions
Every stop, every season, drawn rather than shot.
Replaceable
A cleared photograph drops in and nothing else changes.
This is an unofficial, unsolicited demonstration build. The words are ours, the drawings are ours, the brands are not, and nothing here is licensed, endorsed or authorised by anybody it describes.
The rest of the build, explained the same way.
The nomenclature, the design system and the reasoning behind every part of it.
