Notes: Vienna Family Dental, "Town paper" (s6-photo-art-director)

Concept in one line: the town paper's feature story on the practice: a black-and-white photo essay of a real Vienna where the only color on the page is the patients' smiles.

Main decisions

• Lead picture and headline: a father kneels in a sunlit doorway to tie his son's shoe before school (library people-07, in black and white) under **"We'll never rush you."** That line is the practice's own written policy ("We will never rush you through appointments"), and the photo is a calm, unhurried early morning. The 7:30 opening and "Maple Avenue" go in the line below, as the round-3 steer asked.
• Type: Instrument Serif, a condensed editorial display face, set very large for headlines and pull quotes. It is deliberately not the Garamond look. Archivo carries body text, captions, the dateline and buttons. Headlines are 3-6 words with text-wrap: balance.
• Color: paper white and ink black, with one ink: the logo's blue (#2A6DB0 for the Book button, #1D5C99 for pull quotes and the drop cap). The paying section is a deep-blue duotone of the brick-and-leaves texture. Full color is kept for the real before/after cases only, which is the page's memorable idea.
• Imagery: everything is converted to black and white with tools/tint.ts mono: library photos, stock, the real team portraits, Wikimedia Commons photos of Vienna and a Library of Congress archive picture. That unifies sources that would never match in color, and the gray-backdrop team portraits look like newspaper portraits in mono.
• Signature: newspaper furniture rather than template furniture:
• a dateline bar (hours, rating), the logo as a nameplate, and the nav between a rule and a double rule;
• thick-and-thin rules over every headline, a drop cap and a column rule in the lead story;
• hanging-quote pull quotes, and an italic caption under nearly every photo, with credits where the license needs them.
• Layout and sequence: 1. masthead; 2. full-bleed hero; 3. Dr. Paino feature (portrait, pull quote, two columns); 4. services as a captioned photo essay (one large, four smaller) with an Emergencies box; 5. "Nervous is normal here" (photo ground, white panel overlapping); 6. "Smiles from this chair" (the color spread: the makeover, three close-up cases, two patient quotes); 7. "First visit by age two" (text beside a photo bleeding off the right); 8. "Our corner of Vienna" (the Freeman Store full-bleed, the address as a headline, three captioned photos); 9. "Who you'll see" (two doctors, nine team members); 10. "We file the claim" (duotone ground); 11. "Worth reading" (three columns); 12. "See you at 7:30" (Meadowlark ground, ink panel with hours, white form panel); 13. black footer.

Phones get a sticky Call / Book bar.

Photos used

Real (business/assets): all 12 team portraits (mono); cases makeover-face, veneers, bridge and chipped (in color). veneers-face was left out (it's the same kind of result as the veneers close-up). Logo and white logo.

Library (my half):

• people-07 (hero);
• people-06 (nervous);
• people-10 (kids);
• hero-03 (cosmetic);
• hero-02 (family checkups);
• detail-05 (veneers article);
• place-06 (duotone, paying).

I tried and dropped people-02 (too close to hero-03 in look), detail-01, detail-02, detail-07, hero-04 and people-08.

Stock:

• Invisalign: "Smiling Portrait Of A Young Adult", Burst (no attribution needed): https://www.shopify.com/stock-photos/photos/smiling-portrait-of-a-young-adult
• Implants and gum care: "Park Portrait Of A Smiling Couple", Burst: https://www.shopify.com/stock-photos/photos/park-portrait-of-a-smiling-couple
• First-visit article: "Father And Daughter", Burst: https://www.shopify.com/stock-photos/photos/father-and-daughter
• Same-day crowns: "VMK-Krone Dental crown…", Bin im Garten, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VMK-Krone_Dental_crown_Focus_stacking_with_freeware_CombineZP_12.jpg

Real Vienna (Wikimedia Commons, credited on the page):

• Freeman Store: Jerrye & Roy Klotz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FREEMAN_STORE.jpg
• Vienna W&OD depot: Matthew Zisi, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vienna_Washington_%26_Old_Dominion_Depot.jpg
• July 4th celebration, Vienna, Va.: National Photo Company Collection (Library of Congress), public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:July_4th_celebration,_Vienna,_Va._LCCN2016845532.jpg
• Bridge at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens: Ron Cogswell, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bridge_at_Meadowlark_Botanical_Gardens_Vienna_(VA)_May_2012_(7279201620).jpg
• Gold Meadowlark Gardens (booking ground): Nicolas Raymond, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Meadowlark_Gardens_-_HDR_(15254893744).jpg
• Vienna, VA 22180 (emergencies article): Idawriter, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vienna,_VA_22180,_USA_-_panoramio.jpg

The full Commons pull, with credits, is in stock/commons/index.md.

Placeholders and things to confirm

• [Placeholder: a new-patient exam price, to confirm with the practice] in the paying section (no prices are published).
• Roles for Nancy, Jordan, Kathia and Jenefer aren't in the facts. Nancy and Jordan show tenure only; Kathia and Jenefer show their names only.
• The form posts nowhere (action="#"). The 3 article pages and all nav links go to #.
• Captions: "The Freeman Store on Church Street" and "The old depot on the W&OD Trail" describe the places themselves, not the practice's location. I made no claims about distance from the office.

With better assets or more time

• A real photograph of the practice's building on Maple Avenue, and of Trish at the front desk: the paper concept wants a staff photo "at work" that doesn't exist.
• A strong Church Street or Maple Avenue photo at dusk. The Commons Maple Avenue shots are of a highway junction, and the emergencies picture is the weakest photo on the page.
• A real CEREC milling photo for same-day crowns.
• Self-hosted WOFF2 fonts, srcset for the hero, and AVIF.

The guide: where it helped, where it got in the way

Helped:

• "Write the picture of the place as a photographer's brief" gave a concept that drove every choice, including the B&W conversion and the color-only-for-smiles rule.
• The shot list made the Vienna photo hunt targeted.
• The rules "at least 3 photo-ground sections" and "never two text-only sections in a row" kept the page photo-rich without thinking.
• The "pick type and color from the photos" rule sent me to the logo's blue as the single ink.

Got in the way or left me guessing:

• DESIGN.md wants "a section without a photo carries an illustration". That led me to add the library's balloon tooth, which the reviewer rightly called clip art in an editorial page. In a black-and-white editorial direction, the rule should be "a photo or a typographic device (pull quote, drop cap)", not illustration.
• homepage.md still references docs/site-plan.md and SKILL.md "Pacing", which don't exist here. brief.md asks for a brief while homepage.md says write the module list "in docs/site-plan.md". I used brief.md.
• The self-critique (reviews.md, two passes, five defects each) and the REVIEW.md loop overlap. The reviewer found the more important things: the quote implying the wrong patient, the two similar brunettes.
• Tooling, not the guide: tools/stock.ts killed the shell when run normally (exit 144, likely its Chrome contact sheet). It worked under setsid -w. --place searches returned 1 photo, so I queried the Commons API directly (Category:Vienna,_Virginia was the gold mine: Freeman Store, the depot, LOC archive photos). tools/shoot.ts also needs setsid -w; without -w it returns before writing.

The review loop

It helped. Round 1 caught two real defects I'd missed in my own passes:

• Kadie B.'s quote ("about her daughter's missing front tooth") sat beside an older woman's makeover, implying a false relationship. A factual-integrity catch.
• The hours were unreadable over the bright sky in the booking section.

It also caught the phone hero orphaning "you.". Round 2 caught the phone hours table wrapping mid-phrase and the repeated café-window woman. Round 3 said ship, with polish: the clip-art tooth, two look-alike brunettes, a broken sentence in the kids copy. The points that mattered most were the misplaced quote and the hours readability: one could mislead patients, the other hid the information a booking parent needs.