One sheet of washi, read left to right. At the left edge the ink is still wet: thin, blue, just written, this is what AWO is making now. At the right edge the same ink went down sixty years ago: dried warm-black, soaked into aged fiber, and holding all the color of its era. The site is the ink's lifetime. You never leave the paper.
Each section pins one value of the single root variable --ink-age (0 to 1). That one number derives the ground colour, the ink hue, the grain, the frame dress, the type mix, and how much colour is allowed in. Nothing ever rests mid-gradient, so any page paints instantly legible as the modern side or the archive side.
A fresh sheet is a bright page on a dark writing desk. Old ink is held up dark against backlit paper. So Courses is a light island on a dark surround, and the Film Archive is the exact inverse, dark islands on a glowing light surround. The flip is the visitor's cue that they have crossed into the archive world, and nobody has to be told.
Same site. The ink tells you which side you are on.
One shape everywhere, 4:3 (the anchor is real: Watts's 1959 KQED broadcasts were 4:3). No widescreen on .org. The frame gets heavier and warmer as the ink dries, from a wet hairline to a 10px projector gate.
Pure black and pure white appear nowhere. The modern dark is always cold (#0a1428), the vintage dark is always warm (#241a10), and --sumi is the constant structural black between them. Three tokens are added: the compromised cream, aged paper, and dried ink.
A 1600s humanist serif. Its share grows with age: an accent on the modern side, the owner of every display head and dropcap in the archive.
Weight and measure shift by age: airy 300 on the modern side, settled 400 with a tighter measure in the archive.
Nav, labels, the support row, accession plates. The same face never ages: it is the thread sewing the whole spectrum together, in two costumes.
Every page opens with the fresh signature in the header and closes with the identical signature, sixty years browned, in the footer. A life passing in one scroll, for the cost of two CSS declarations. On the home page the hero goes further: a portrait of Alan bleeds into blank washi under your cursor, and you draw him out of the paper with your own hand.