Mood board — references and anti-references
Mood board
Visual version (the one to look at): https://claude.ai/artifact/7RkR5Dg45Jn9JNtTA55nMj — four directions (A pencil and paper, B the quiet house, C the journal, D warm and civic) with samples, live type specimens, the photograph question, and copy notes. This markdown file is the working notes behind it.
Screenshots taken 2026-09-18 at 1440px, stored in moodboard/ (small JPEGs). Each entry says what to take and what to leave. The point is not to copy any of them but to find the material our identity is made from.
The material we already own
These are the real artefacts. The redesign builds from them rather than from a style.
| Artefact | Where | What it gives us |
|---|---|---|
| The pencil spiral | ../devspaces-consolidation/assets/spiral.jpeg, DS-logo-clean.png, and the whitepaper cover | A hand-drawn mark with a signature in it. Humble, serious, unmistakably not generated. The current site replaced it with a smooth SVG spiral; the redesign uses the real drawing. |
| The whitepaper cover (Sep 2025) | assets/paper/ds-cover-2025.jpg | Straw-yellow paper, vermilion title, pencil spirals, the Life Itself swallow. This is the palette source: paper, graphite, vermilion. |
| The Samarra minaret etching | assets/tower.png | A real engraving of a real spiral building. The one "spine" image. |
| Photographs of the Life Itself hub, Bergerac | assets/photos/ (from ../next.lifeitself.org/assets/images/) | The long table in the garden at the 2019 gathering; the salon with the painted mural; the stone buildings; a candlelit dinner at the 2025 praxis residency; gardening. Real people in a real place. The site is about these and has never shown them. |
Note: the images in assets/ that look like place photos (Plum Village, Tamera, Embercombe, Monastic Academy…) are screenshots of those organisations' websites, taken for the examples pages. They are not usable as photography.
References
Places that show themselves
| Site | Take | Leave |
|---|---|---|
Plum Village moodboard/plumvillage.jpg | Calligraphic hand-drawn logotype next to plain type. Split layout: text on a quiet ground, one large photograph of real people. Warm without decoration. | The carousel. |
Monastic Academy moodboard/monasticacademy.jpg | One photograph, a dimmed olive-khaki wash, a centred italic line. Shows that quiet gravitas needs very little. | Full-bleed hero with text over the image is the retreat-centre template. |
Deep Springs College moodboard/deepsprings.jpg | Place and people in the same frame; the landscape is the argument. Slab serif feels honest rather than styled. | The template around it. |
San Francisco Zen Center moodboard/sfzc.jpg | A single red enso as the mark; letterspaced small-caps serif wordmark; sepia portrait. Tradition carried lightly. | Dated framework. |
Findhorn moodboard/findhorn.jpg | People dancing at sunset: joy as evidence. | Stacked promotional bars, stock-ish gloss. |
Taizé moodboard/taize.jpg | Photo tiles of real community life; one warm accent colour. Humane. | Generic sans, rounded buttons. |
Publications with a material feel
| Site | Take | Leave |
|---|---|---|
Dark Mountain moodboard/darkmountain.jpg | A real engraving at full scale as the opening image. One accent (burnt orange) on black. Numbered nav items. A torn paper edge between sections. The strongest "made by hands" feel of anything surveyed. | Its darkness; ours is a door, not a mountain. |
The Point moodboard/thepoint.jpg | Photographs of the physical magazine; dusty rose ground; small-caps sans for the issue line, serif for the title. The object gives the site its texture. | Hmm, nothing much; it is a magazine. |
Noema moodboard/noema.jpg | Editorial authority: bold serif display, a deep red band, commissioned illustration. | Too glossy and too institutional for a front door. |
Aeon moodboard/aeon.jpg | Confident centred serif over a strong image; nothing decorative. | Magazine grid below. |
Emergence Magazine moodboard/emergence.jpg | Softness and light; the sense of the seasons. | Ethereal gradients and a light sans would read as "wellness". |
Family and neighbours
| Site | Relation |
|---|---|
Life Itself moodboard/lifeitself.jpg | The parent. Yellow, the swallow, photo hero with centred serif. We should rhyme (the swallow in the attribution, warmth) and not copy (no yellow-first, no centred hero). |
Archipelago moodboard/archipelago.jpg | The sibling. Blue map world, Cormorant Garamond. Deliberately a different visual world; do not converge. |
Anti-references
| Pattern | Seen at | Why not |
|---|---|---|
| The retreat-centre template: full-bleed photo, white sans headline, rounded CTA, cookie bar | Esalen, Schumacher, Embercombe, Hawkwood, Garrison moodboard/esalen.jpg, schumacher.jpg, embercombe.jpg | Interchangeable. Says "we are an institution with a marketing department". |
| The AI editorial template: parchment ground, serif plus tracked monospace eyebrows, italic accent word in every headline, rubric margin, three cards | Our own current site moodboard/dshome.jpg, dslearn.jpg | Has a style, not an identity. See design-direction.md §2. |
| The wellness gradient: pastel, airy sans, soft-focus | (Emergence at its softest; most "conscious living" sites) | Undermines the spine. |
Direction E: watercolour (added 2026-09-18, evening)
Source: Awami Conscious Food System (Valérie Duvauchelle, illustrated and edited by Jennifer Chan, Life Itself, 2026), 26 pages, in sandbox/ (not in git). The book's language: loose watercolour illustration (figures, places, food, abstract colour ribbons, a yellow road as a diagram), a near-white page, one flat Life Itself yellow block, a tight-set transitional serif (Literaturnaya; nearest web cousins PT Serif, Prata, Frank Ruhl Libre), narrow text columns, lots of air.
Rufus's steer: this is the feeling to aim for. Nothing we currently own is fixed (the cover and the five-domains drawing can be redone in this hand; Samarra is good but was too much for a cover and belongs inside as a plate). No photography will be commissioned, and the site is about the general idea, not the Bergerac hub, so photographs are not needed at all. Illustration is the realistic route: Jennifer Chan has already painted this world.
Extracted assets for mockups (scratchpad only; the book's paintings are stand-ins until new work is commissioned): monk, cook, building, blue circle, yellow road, vegetables, ribbons, table, cover wash.
What the board says
- Illustration resolves the image question. Watercolour (E) or pencil (A) can carry the whole site without a photograph, which is the only realistic route given no photography will be commissioned.
- Identity comes from artefacts, not from a theme. Dark Mountain has engravings, Plum Village has a hand-drawn logotype, The Point has the physical magazine. We have a pencil spiral, a yellow paper cover, an etching, and photographs of a house in Bergerac.
- One accent colour, drawn from the artefact. Dark Mountain's orange, SFZC's red enso. Ours is the vermilion of the cover title.
- Photographs of real people at a real table beat any illustration of "community". Plum Village, Findhorn, Deep Springs all prove it. We have those photographs.
- Quiet is fine; generic is not. The Monastic Academy is quiet and specific. The retreat-centre template is loud and generic.
- Print habits translate. Numbered contents, captions, small caps used sparingly, a hand-drawn rule between sections: the site should feel like a well-kept working notebook of a real project, which is what it is.
