Notes: s6-photo-art-director, round 5, Art Deco

Concept: a grand-hotel jewel box on Maple Avenue: the family, the work and the team framed like portraits in stepped brass frames. The words read like an engraved card.

Main decisions

• Type: Italiana, tall high-contrast Didone capitals, for every heading. It gives the deco "tall elegant capitals" without the Garamond-style serif of round 1. Jost, Futura's 1920s geometry, for text and the engraved small caps. Two families.
• Color: deep emerald #0B3A33 and black-jade ink #061C19 for the dark sections, lapis #1C3F73 (the logo's blue, deepened) for the children's block and the secondary services band, and pale celadon and paper for the light sections (no cream). One bright metal, brass #E0B35A, kept for rules, frames, ornaments and the Book button only. No gradients anywhere: the sunburst is SVG lines, and the frames are clip-paths.
• Signature: the hero's "jewel box", an emerald panel with a stepped ziggurat crest and a brass sunburst, laid over the full-bleed autumn family photo. The same stepped corner repeats as a double brass frame around every real photo (cases, doctors, the archive shots). Arched brass outlines are used for the service photos and the team portraits.
• Imagery: warm library photos for mood (home, calm, children). The real cases are in frames on dark ink, like a gallery wall. All 12 team portraits are converted to black and white (tint.ts mono 0.94), like studio portraits in a hotel lobby, which also tames the mottled gray backdrop. A Library of Congress photo of Vienna's post office (National Photo Company, roughly 1909-1932) sits behind the booking form, so the era of the direction meets the real town. The W&OD depot is duotoned to match.
• Words: H1 "Polished on Maple Avenue" (polish as in teeth, and as in manners, on their real street). The section headings: Results worth framing · The whole family, one address · Nerves checked at the door · Small guests, first class · The company you'll keep · Overheard on Maple Avenue · Insurance, filed for you · Reserve your chair · Find us on Maple · Worth a read. The 7:30 opening and "never rush" appear only in body copy ("an appointment nobody hurries").
• Layout: the hero is a panel over a full-bleed photo. Results are a gallery wall (one large face case and three pairs). Services are four arched photo cards, followed by an engraved lapis strip for the other four. Nerves is a full-bleed photo with an emerald panel. Children is a tall framed portrait overlapping a lapis block. Team is a lead portrait with a quote, then two doctors, then nine arches. Reviews are two Italiana cards on a duotone leaf-shadow ground. Insurance is a framed photo overlapping a ruled card. Booking is the form panel over the archive photo. Then hours and the depot, the articles, and the footer. On phone there's a sticky Call/Book bar.

Photos used

Library (my half): hero-02 (hero), hero-03, hero-04, people-01, people-02, people-06, people-09, detail-04, detail-05, detail-08, texture-02 (duotoned #04201B/#2C6B5C); illustration SVG 03, recolored brass/emerald (the children's balloon tooth).

Real (business/assets): all 12 team portraits (black and white); the cases makeover-face, veneers, bridge and chipped.

Online (Wikimedia Commons, via the API directly; stock/commons/index.md has the full list):

• "P.O., Vienna, Va.", National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P.O.,_Vienna,_Va._LCCN2016824775.jpg (cropped)
• "Vienna Washington & Old Dominion Depot", Matthew Zisi, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vienna_Washington_%26_Old_Dominion_Depot.jpg (duotoned; credited in the caption)

Downloaded but not used: the 1909 station (too low-res), the July 4th celebration, Meadowlark, Maple Avenue at Nutley (a highway-sign view), and others.

Placeholders

• [Placeholder: price guidance from the office] in the insurance section.
• [CONFIRM: same working day?]: how fast the office calls back after a booking request.
• The form has no back end (posts to #book).
• The roles of Nancy, Jordan, Kathia and Jenefer aren't in facts.md, so they're shown as "Team".
• The archive photo is dated "early 1900s": the collection spans 1909-1932, and the exact year isn't known.

With better assets or more time

• A real photo of 307 Maple Ave W, or of the team at work. The hero would be far stronger as the real practice.
• A larger, cleaner scan of the LoC post office photo, from loc.gov's TIFF rather than the Commons JPEG. A small brass caption plate in the frame style would also help.
• A custom deco monogram (the logo's VF) for the crest instead of a generic sunburst.
• Self-hosted, subset WOFF2 fonts, srcset/AVIF for the hero, and real form handling.

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

• Helped: "the first screen is a photograph", "10+ photos" and "3 photo-ground sections" kept the deco direction from turning into a type-and-ornament poster, which is the obvious failure for Art Deco. Pick type and color from the photos also worked: the emerald is the hero's shutters and boxwood, and the brass is the mums and leaves.
• Helped: "The team: one consistent treatment" led straight to the black-and-white portrait idea.
• Left me guessing: DESIGN.md step 2 (the "picture of the place") and step 4 (search stock for each shot) assume stock is the main source. With the library, half the shot list was already filled, so I skipped most of the stock searching. The guide could say "library first, stock for the gaps and for the real town".
• Got in the way, slightly: writing.md says "no puns", while the direction's voice asks for "quietly witty". I kept the wit to gentle double meanings that still say something true ("Polished", "Nerves checked at the door", "Reserve your chair"). The guide and the direction should agree on how much wit is allowed.
• Missing: nothing in the guide warns that an archive or historic photo is a strong local asset. Commons' Category:Vienna,_Virginia (with LoC photos) was the best local source; keyword search wasn't.
• Tooling: stock.ts --place is still thin, so I used the Commons API with curl and pauses. shoot.ts needs setsid -w.

The review loop

It helped. Round 1 caught a real honesty problem I had written myself: a line claiming "every face on this page" was a real patient, while the hero and service photos are library images. That was the most important point. It also caught two icon grids whose recolored illustrations read as smudges, so I removed them and used engraved small caps instead. Round 2 caught the insurance still life repeating the sedation photo's armchair, throw and mug (same generated "shoot"), and that the service cards didn't line up. Round 2's verdict was ship. I applied its polish and stopped there.