Notes: Vienna Family Dental (s5, explore then select)

Concept: the register. The practice's real advantage is continuity: Trish at the front desk since 1989, Ann since 1991, Dr. Paino since 2005. So the page reads like an old, trusted institution's ledger: who you'll see, and the year they arrived. It's set on ivory paper in the logo's Trajan-like caps, with the team on their own studio gray.

Process (as the guide asked)

• brief.md first, then six concepts (explore/concepts.md), six first-screen sketches with 12 screenshots (explore/1-6.html, -desktop.png, -phone.png).
• A creative-director subagent ranked them blind (it had only the brief and the screenshots): explore/verdict.md. Winner #1 (the "Who you'll see / here since" register), with #6's headline merged in ("...where nobody is rushed").
• Sections explored two ways each (explore/sA|sB|sC): gentle care, smile cases, team. Picked split portrait + three columns, one lead case + smaller pairs, and the wall on the portraits' backdrop gray.
• Built, then three critique rounds: my own pass; a cold subagent critique (13 problems, most fixed); a final creative-director look (8 problems). Last round: the hero's small round avatars became four real portraits with big years (its top fix), the button blue went deeper, team captions became consistent, and the services headline got shorter. Not fixed: the lead case's before and after differ in scale and head position (source photos), and Dr. Paino's portrait appears in the hero, the care section and the wall (it's the only photo of him).

Decisions

• Type: Marcellus (display; the closest Google face to the logo's Trajan-style wordmark) + Mulish (text). Body 18px (17 on phones), h2 31-46px, hero 38-64px via clamp. Big numerals for years and the 4.9 rating.
• Color: ivory paper #f8f5ef (matches the logo's paper) and stone #efe9df for grouping; ink #2a2420 (the logo's "DENTAL" brown-black); navy #1b3150 for headings and the footer; a deeper logo blue #1f5592 only for Book buttons. Team section on #47423f, the gray of the portraits' own backdrop, so the twelve photos sit seamlessly. Gold only for the review stars.
• Surfaces / details: one 2px radius, one button style (filled blue, primary only; phone is a bold text link), hairline rules instead of cards, no shadows except the small-screen menu.
• Signature: the "since" years. They start as the hero's register (four portraits, four big years) and end as Trish's portrait with an oversized 1989 across it, heading the team wall.
• Layout / pacing: hero split (headline + register) → quiet 4-fact strip → services as a two-column index (stone) → split portrait and story for nervous patients → smile cases (one large pair, two smaller; stone) → the dark team moment → two-column children / insurance → big 4.9 + one long quote (stone) → article list → book form beside visit details (stone) → navy footer.
• Logo: the JPG has an off-white box, so I un-blended it from its paper color into a transparent PNG (img/logo.png). The white PNG is used in the footer.
• Phone: compact header (logo, phone number, Menu as a <details>, no JS); full-width Book button; a sticky Call / Book bar that slides in after the hero, using a CSS scroll timeline (no JS).
• Insurance honesty: the hero says "We file every major insurance plan for you", linked to a plain explanation of out-of-network billing. The first critique rightly flagged "We accept every major plan" as misleading next to it.

Placeholders and owner questions

• Price: new-patient exam, X-rays and cleaning, "from $___" (marked in the page).
• Reply time for booking requests: not on the page, because the copy reads fine without it. Ask the owner.
• Roles for Nancy, Jordan, Kathia and Jenefer (shown as "On the team since..." / "On the team").
• Parking at 307 Maple Ave W, and whether the practice itself dates from before 1989. I didn't claim a founding year.
• The form posts nowhere (action="#"), and the booking link is #book until there's online booking.

With better assets or more time

• A shot list: (1) Trish at the front desk, morning light, for the team section or the hero; (2) the building on Maple Ave by day, for the visit section; (3) an operatory with the TV and blankets, for the nervous-patients section; (4) the CEREC mill, for same-day crowns; (5) a child's Happy Visit (with consent). The hero has no photo of the place, which is the main thing keeping it from looking more established.
• More smile cases with matched lighting. The makeover case was dropped from the homepage because its framing and color don't match the others.
• Self-host and subset the two fonts; serve AVIF with srcset.

Where the guide helped, and where it got in the way

Helped

• Diverging into six concepts genuinely changed the result. My first instinct was #3 (navy panel + Dr. Paino with crossed arms), which the blind ranking correctly called "any dentist's site". The winning register idea came from forcing myself to write six.
• The blind creative-director subagent was the most valuable step. Without my reasoning to lean on, it judged the work coldly, and its fixes (merge #6's headline, bigger faces, no boxed logo) were concrete. The cold critique after the build caught the misleading insurance line and the repeated "label + rule + headline left" section pattern, which I had stopped seeing.
• The "when assets are weak" and pacing rules kept me from putting stock imagery in the hero and from making a card grid.

Got in the way / left me guessing

• The budget is tight for the process: six sketches, nine section sketches, a build and three critique rounds in about an hour means the sketches are very rough. Six concepts at about 10 minutes each is the whole hour. Four concepts would probably find the same winner.
• The CD subagent checklist pushes toward "a photo of the place in the hero" even when none exists. The guide should say how to judge a type-led hero when the brief has no establishing photo, so critics don't keep asking for an asset that doesn't exist.
• Placeholders: the guide says to mark them visibly, and the critic then flags them as the worst "unfinished" tell. It should say which placeholders belong on the page (a price) and which belong only in the owner questions (reply time, roles). I moved two of them off the page for that reason.
• "Two calls to action" plus "the primary is the only loud button" plus "a sticky phone bar" collide on the phone's first screen (two Book buttons visible at once). I solved it with a scroll-revealed bar. The guide could state that rule.
• homepage.md references SKILL.md and docs/site-plan.md, which don't exist here (the brief went to brief.md). writing.md's copy check also mentions service pages. Those are minor, but each made me stop and decide.
• The "one accent reserved for the primary action" vs "colors come from the logo" rule: the logo has only blue. I split it into navy for brand and the logo's mid-blue for action. That works, but the guide could expect it.