Field Notes

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Style-led wiki redesign mockups

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Ten generated images from 2026-07-14, exploring the wiki’s visual style while holding its feature set fixed. They are the first of the wiki’s three design explorations, and the only one made with the running interface in view: the prompts supplied screenshots of the live light and dark wiki at a 1440 by 1000 desktop viewport and asked for a redesign of its visual hierarchy, not of what it does. The prompts are preserved verbatim.

The vault held roughly 170 notes when these were made. It holds 554 now, so the density judgements in them were made against a corpus a third of the present size.

The editorial workbench mockup, showing a collapsible note library, a central article, and a right-hand outline

Three images came from the first pass. Editorial workbench became the implementation baseline: it kept the three-region information architecture while making the reading surface dominant and the library collapsible. Knowledge atlas was the speculative alternative, and its flatter surfaces and connection treatment fed the redesign even though its invented Atlas, Timeline, and Sources destinations were never built. Rendering components is a specimen board rather than a screen, covering callouts, tables, code controls, connections, tags, search results, the page outline, and graph controls.

A second pass deliberately removed the live screenshots and any reference to familiar documentation layouts from the prompt, which produced three unrelated proposals: a spatial reading desk, an editorial folio drawing on scholarly editions, museum catalogues, and running-page furniture, and a graph-focused environment making the relationship map the primary means of navigation.

What survived from that second pass was narrow: pinning, stronger page furniture, and the principle that a note’s kind should be signalled redundantly through icon, shape, label, and placement rather than through colour alone. The conventional navigation and reading hierarchy stayed, and the record of the exploration is explicit that they stayed because they worked rather than because the prompts protected them.

Four further images test single elements in isolation. The dark studies chose between a blue-black archive palette, which was adopted, and a warmer midnight vellum, which was not. The diagram studies explore a reusable visual language for Mermaid diagrams and controls and hierarchy for viewing the complete graph, which bears on Graphs.

These images are not implementation specifications, and several of them depict interfaces that were never built and in some cases could not be. Their evidential value is as a record of what was considered and rejected, which Reading interface redesign proposals draws on.

Built on 11 sources (11 archived here).

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