Notes: s7-blueprint-remix, round 4 (direction: Main Street shop)

Concept in one line: the practice as a well-loved shop on Maple Avenue (painted sign board, striped awning, an "Open" sign in the window, the hours on the door), rebuilt on the layout system of Fishs Eddy's homepage.

Process (the guide's method)

• Brief: brief.md. Research: 20 candidate sites screenshotted into refs/ (about half failed: bot checks, video heroes, cookie walls, a dead domain). Blueprint and teardown: refs/blueprint.md. Blueprint: Fishs Eddy (fishseddy.com), a NYC dish shop. Secondary: The Grey (thegreyrestaurant.com), for the pairing of sign capitals with a script.
• Two side-by-side passes against the blueprint: reviews.md. Then the REVIEW.md loop: reviews/.

Main decisions

• Type: Archivo at its widest (125%) and heaviest, in caps, for every heading, tag and button: sign-painter lettering, close to Fishs Eddy's wide flared grotesque. Source Serif 4 for reading. Yellowtail script only for "Open", "Come on in" on the door glass, and the reviewers' names, like gilt lettering on a window. That's three families where the build standard says two; the script is small and decorative and earns it for this direction.
• Color: the logo's blue as the painted sign board (header, door, footer, one tile); brick red for the primary button, the awning stripes and the team's brick wall; plaster white ground; charcoal for the two dark bands (the blueprint's); one pale-sky band. No cream, navy or gold.
• Signature: the header as a shopfront: a painted blue board with the logo on a white plaque, a scalloped brick-and-white awning hanging over the hero, and a hanging "Open, Mon-Thu from 7:30" sign over the photo's edge. Further down: the hours lettered on a door's glass, and the cases standing on oak shelves with painted plank labels.
• Layout from the blueprint: split hero with the photo bleeding right; 4 photo tiles with tilted paper tags; split feature with the photo bleeding left; the "Explore our shelves" shelf display (here, before/afters); the dark "We exist in real life too" band with tilted, tagged storefront prints (here, real Vienna places); slab buttons with an offset shadow.
• Layout changes in the review loop: dropped the blueprint's marquee strip (it read as a stat strip); made Kids a full-bleed photo with a paper panel; mirrored Insurance, so the splits don't march in step.

Images used

Library (library/img/): hero-02-1 (hero: family on brick steps), people-03-1 (checkups tile), detail-04-1 (kids tile), people-06-1 (Scared of the dentist), people-07-1 (Before school, before work), hero-01-2 (Kids, full-bleed), texture-07-1 (the oak shelves). Library images were used as they are: they already match each other and the warm brick palette. (The recolorable aligner SVG was tried as the Invisalign tile and taken out in review: an icon in a row of photos read as a placeholder.)

Real practice assets: logo.jpg, logo-white.png; all 12 team portraits; cases veneers, bridge, chipped and makeover-face (before and after) on the shelves; veneers-face-after (the Invisalign tile: her case started with Invisalign) and a crop of chipped-after (the Veneers & bonding tile).

Stock, all Wikimedia Commons, given a light warm wash (tint.ts wash #F2C9A0 0.2) so they sit with the library:

• Freeman Store: "FREEMAN STORE VIENNA", by Jerrye & Roy Klotz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FREEMAN_STORE_VIENNA.jpg
• Old Vienna station: "Vienna Washington & Old Dominion Depot", by Matthew Zisi, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vienna_Washington_%26_Old_Dominion_Depot.jpg
• Meadowlark: "Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in October (22189089383)", by DC Gardens, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meadowlark_Botanical_Gardens_in_October_(22189089383).jpg
• Town green: "Vienna, VA 22180, USA - panoramio", by Idawriter, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vienna,_VA_22180,_USA_-_panoramio.jpg

The credits are also in the page footer. The Vienna prints are captioned "Our neighbors", never as the office.

Placeholders

• [CONFIRM: parking] in Find us. Question for the practice: is there a lot, or street parking, at 307?
• [CONFIRM: how fast]: how soon does the front desk reply to a booking request?
• The booking form has no back end (#book, as asked). "The front desk will get back to you to confirm a time" describes how a request form works; confirm the wording with the practice.
• No prices (none published). Services link to #.

With better assets or more time

• A real photo of 307 Maple Ave W: the actual door, the sign, the building. The whole concept asks for it, and it would replace a generic photo in the hero or the door section. A photo of the real front desk with Trish would beat any stock.
• A real Church Street photo: Commons had nothing usable (searches returned Vienna, Austria).
• Hand-painted SVG lettering for the H1 and "Open" instead of a font.
• Self-hosted, subset fonts (build standard); a real form handler.

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

Helped:

• The blueprint method gave me a structure I wouldn't have invented, and it fits the direction. A real shop's site (Fishs Eddy) supplied the tilted paper tags, the shelf display and the "we exist in real life" band. The page reads as a shop's site rather than a dental template because of them.
• "Measure it from the screenshots" made the build fast: the grid, the bleeding split photos and the type scale carried over directly.
• brief.md's headline rule and table kept every heading short from the first draft. The reviewer found no explaining headlines.

Got in the way, or left me guessing:

• Research cost a lot for its yield. About half of the 20 candidate sites didn't screenshot (Cloudflare checks, video heroes, cookie walls, a domain for sale). A curated list of known-good, screenshot-able references per direction would save 20-30 minutes.
• The blueprint method and a given direction pull slightly apart. The guide assumes the blueprint is the whole look, but the round also hands me a direction (Main Street shop). I resolved it as: the blueprint's structure, the direction's identity (awning, sign board, door, brick). The guide should say that's the intended split.
• The blueprint's own palette is cream, which the owner rejected; the guide could warn that palettes don't transfer.
• homepage.md and writing.md still refer to SKILL.md, docs/site-plan.md, service pages and the PR, which don't exist here. The build standard asks for at most 2 font families; the direction's "lettering with personality" wanted a third (a script). I took it and noted it.
• Nothing in the guide covers the library's recolorable SVGs or tint.ts. I used tint.ts lightly (a warm wash on the Wikimedia photos). The one SVG I used was rejected in review as a placeholder-looking tile, which suggests spot illustrations need a defined role (an ornament, a sign) rather than standing in for a photo.
• A real local photo search is hit-or-miss: "Church Street Vienna" returned Vienna, Austria; the Freeman Store and the W&OD depot came through.

The review loop: yes, it helped. Three rounds: 8 → 8 → 8 (ship), with every sub-score up a point or held. The points that mattered most: 1. Two factual errors I'd missed: Jason A. credited to "Google review" (the quotes come from the practice's site), and quoted twice. 2. Casting: three near-identical brunettes in cream knits read as one generated model. Replacing two tiles with the practice's real results made the services row stronger and more honest. 3. Rhythm: five 50/50 splits in a row, and "7:30" said six times. The full-bleed Kids section and the mirrored Insurance section fixed it. Dropping the marquee strip also removed a stat-strip tell. 4. The collage running off the screen, and phone-only breakages (the Kids panel over a bare band). I wouldn't have caught those as quickly myself.