rounds/r2/s6-photo-art-director/notes.md

Notes: Vienna Family Dental, method s6 (photo art director)

Concept: an October morning in Vienna at 7:30, low sun through yellow maples, a mother and daughter (one baby tooth missing) laughing on the way to school: a neighborhood, not a clinic. "Open at 7:30 so you're done before school" is the line that makes it this practice.

Main decisions

Imagery: 14 stock photos on one theme (warm autumn daylight, families of every age, leaves), plus all 12 real team portraits and all 4 real smile cases: about 30 images on the page. Four sections have a photo background (hero, sedation, reviews, booking). Stock gets one shared grade baked in with Pillow (a touch warmer, slightly desaturated, a bit more contrast); the toothbrush gets an extra CSS sepia. Team portraits share one crop (4:5, face high) and a light sepia so the gray backdrop reads warm.
Shapes: full-bleed hero; a 4:5 portrait breaking up into the hero, then a 3:1 panoramic strip; a bento of photo and icon tiles; a full-bleed photo with an overlapping solid panel; a dark gallery with a large lead pair; a row of three portraits plus a nine-up strip; a portrait over a color block with an inset square; a split; a full-bleed quote; thumbnails; a form panel over a leaf texture.
Color, taken from the hero: evergreen #17271F (shade under the trees), maple-leaf yellow #E9B53C, persimmon #C2481F (fallen leaves; the primary button only), oat #EFE7DA (the mother's sweater), paper, and the logo blue for inline links. No navy, no metallic gold, no cream-and-serif.
Type: Bricolage Grotesque (headings, set big and tight) + Hanken Grotesk (body). Warm and slightly irregular, and far from the Garamond look the owner rejected.
Signature: the 7:30 morning as the story (H1, the hours section with the boy and his backpack, "7:30 AM, in and out before school" in the kids section). Tenure appears only in Dr. Paino's bio line.
Order: hero → mornings/hours/emergency → services → sedation (nervous patients) → real results → team → children → insurance → reviews → articles → book + visit → footer. Sticky Call/Book dock on phones.

Stock photos used (all Burst, free license, no attribution needed)

No stock person is named or captioned, and no stock room appears anywhere. One real case photo (veneers-face-after) also illustrates the veneers article card.

Placeholders

Prices: [PLACEHOLDER: typical fees] in the insurance section (the practice publishes none).
Roles: Nancy, Jordan, Kathia and Jenefer appear with no role, because the facts don't give one.
Booking form: posts nowhere (no back end in this round); it says "we'll call you back".
The three articles link to # (they're planned, not written).

With better assets or more time

A half-day shoot at the real office and on Maple Ave/Church St in October: the front door, the chair with the blanket and headphones, Trish at the desk, a parent and child in the waiting room. That would replace the stock where it matters most (sedation band, hero) and make the page unmistakably Vienna. The stock libraries had nothing identifiably Vienna (no Church Street, no W&OD Trail).
Self-host and subset the fonts; AVIF/WebP with srcset (now just one JPEG per image, ~5 MB total).
A keyboard-accessible before/after slider for the lead case.

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

Helped

"Write the photograph that is the practice" (step 2) was the most useful instruction: it produced the whole concept, and the palette and type came straight out of it, as the guide says. That's what made this page different from last round's.
The hard numbers (first screen ≥70% photo, ≥10 photos, ≥3 photo-background sections, never two text-only sections in a row) pushed the layout away from text panels. Without them I'd have fallen back to cards.
The review checklist's photo-specific questions (face covered by text? which photo breaks the set? does it still work at 390?) caught real defects: the sedation panel covering the face, the cool toothbrush, the veneers crop.

Got in the way or left me guessing

The stock tool barely works as shipped: without Pexels/Unsplash keys it falls back to Burst, whose search page blocks Node's fetch, so most searches returned 0-6 low-relevance Openverse images. I wrote a curl-based copy (scratch/burst.mjs) to get usable contact sheets. A method this dependent on photos needs a reliable source (an API key, or the tool fixed). This cost the most time.
The shot list asks for "Vienna or a street like it", but no free library has Vienna, VA. The guide could say outright: "generic autumn and tree-lined streets are the substitute; don't promise 'Vienna' in a caption."
homepage.md still refers to SKILL.md, "Pacing" and docs/site-plan.md, which aren't in this guide; brief.md and DESIGN.md's brief.md overlap. Harmless, but confusing.
"At least 3 sections with a photo background" plus "backgrounds change only to group (2-3 in total)" (homepage.md) pull against each other. I counted photo bands as their own kind.
The guide gives no direction for when the real photos clash with the stock look (here: dark, flash-lit clinical close-ups next to golden autumn). I put the cases on a dark evergreen section so they look deliberate; a line on this would help.
The build standard's Worker/self-hosted-font rules don't apply to a file:// page; I ignored them as TASK.md says.