Three directions for Meridian

Why Care?

The sibling spike earlier the same day was a content-heavy site that buried its reader in vocabulary; the fix was to orient before explaining. This one is the inverse case, and worth logging precisely because it inverts.

The live site is 300 words on one page, and the client asked that it stay simple. There is nothing to cut. Every instinct a design process has — add a section, add a stat, add a testimonial, add a philosophy — is wrong here, and all of them are easy to act on without noticing.

So the constraint went into the build rather than into a style note. WORD_BUDGET is a real exported number, each direction's built HTML is counted against it, and the content schema is shaped so that one sentence per investment area is the only thing an author can comfortably write.

What shipped

Three designs of the same one page, plus a chooser and the two reference pages.

• Card — a calling card. One screen, enormous air, a single brass accent spent once.

• Sheet — a one-page document. Structure instead of air, mono labels, hairline rules, the two real figures promoted to the data face.

• Aperture — dark and atmospheric. A slow horizon built from tokens, very few words, the one photograph treated with care.

Worth keeping

A word budget is a better artefact than a style note. "Keep it short" does not constrain anyone. A number that a build step checks does. Same lesson as the plain_question field in the sibling project: a rule that lives in the content model survives a template rewrite, and a rule that lives in a design document does not.

Sometimes there is no brand to extract. Every colour on the live page turned out to be the stock editor swatch set — defaults nobody picked. Saying that out loud changed the engagement from "honour the existing identity" to "propose one," and the proposal came from the only considered visual on the site, which was the headshot. Worth checking for explicitly on any page-builder site before assuming the palette means something.

Protect the one sentence that sounds like a person. On a 300-word page, exactly one line had a human voice in it. On a longer site it would be a nice detail; here it is the entire personality of the page, and every direction was briefed to preserve it verbatim and give it room.