The emotion axis

A page is not sections. It is a sequence of states a person passes through with their hand on a wheel. The device kit decides how a page looks, the grammar decides what a page is, and this file decides what it does to somebody.

Design the feeling before the acts. An act list written first will always be a list of things that happen, and a page of things happening is a page nobody can describe afterwards.

Read this after the interview, alongside uniqueness.md, before the score table in SKILL.md Step 2.

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1. The feeling curve

Write the curve as its own artifact, in BRIEF.md, before a single act exists. One line per act: the emotion, then the thing on screen that causes it.

The emotion column is the constraint. The cause column is the only place a device name may appear, and it appears second, because the feeling picks the device and never the other way round.

Useful states, not a closed list: curiosity, recognition, unease, doubt, tension, awe, delight, relief, intimacy, confidence, resolve, calm.

If two adjacent acts produce the same feeling, one of them is filler. Cut it or change what it does. Two acts of awe in a row is one act of awe followed by a reader who has adjusted. Every emotion is defined by what preceded it, which is why the curve matters more than any single peak: relief needs tension in front of it, awe needs quiet in front of it, intimacy needs scale in front of it.

The curve also outranks the journey beats from Step 1. Beats say what the visitor learns. The curve says what they feel while learning it. When they disagree, the curve wins, because nobody remembers what they learned on a page that made them feel nothing.

Worked curve: a canned drink brand

1  Recognition   their own kitchen counter at 7am, shot at eye height
2  Fatigue       the two containers, the mess, held still while copy names it
3  Delight       a wipe, and the whole frame is one cold can, condensation running
4  Trust         macro texture at a scale the eye cannot get in a shop
5  Appetite      the flavours travelling sideways, each one landing whole
6  Resolve       everything stops, one can, one line, one place to buy it

Worked curve: an infrastructure product for engineers

1  Familiar dread  the alert channel at 3am, real markup, already scrolling
2  Doubt           the log fills and nothing in it explains anything
3  Clarity         one panel resolves the whole trace, the noise falls away
4  Control         the visitor moves a selection and the surface answers
5  Competence      the real numbers arrive on telemetry they can check
6  Readiness       a live input with a cursor in it, not a button

Worked curve: a landscape design-build firm

1  Stillness   a garden at dawn, almost nothing moving, held long
2  Longing     copy naming the space they actually have, small and honest
3  Curiosity   the drawing builds itself, survey to plan to planting
4  Weight      material facts as museum labels, stone, cedar, water
5  Warmth      the same garden five years on, people in it
6  Intent      a quiet line of running text, not a CTA island

Worked curve: a live event or festival brand

1   Pulse       a cut before the reader has settled, sound implied not played
2   Appetite    faces, close, one per screen, gone
3   Envy        the year before, at speed, twelve cuts in a viewport-height
4   Urgency     the real date and the real capacity, counting
5   Belonging   one held frame, the crowd, the only slow moment on the page
6   Decision    abrupt, full bleed, the ticket line and nothing else

Note what the fourth curve does that the others do not: its one slow act is the peak, because on a page made entirely of cuts, stopping is the loudest thing available. The peak is defined by contrast with its own page, not by an absolute amount of spectacle.

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2. The peak

People remember one peak moment and the ending. The middle compresses into a general impression and then goes. This is the peak-end rule and it is the single most useful thing known about how anybody experiences a sequence.

So every build engineers one deliberate peak. Name it in BRIEF.md as the sentence a visitor would say to a friend:

the screen went black and then the whole ocean lit up under me

Not "the hero is impressive". A described moment, with a before and an after.

The peak gets three things, and it gets them at the expense of other acts:

A page with three peaks has none. Three impressive acts flatten each other, and the visitor leaves able to say the site was nice and unable to say what happened. If a second act is competing, demote it: shorter span, less asset, plainer device. Something has to be the biggest thing.

The ending must resolve. The last feeling is the one they carry, and a page that trails off into a footer overwrites everything the peak did. Resolution means the page arrives somewhere and stops: the divider collapses, the world lands at a place, the type shrinks to its quietest setting, the surface hands over an input. The close cue holds (see the cue contract in devices.md §2) so the final screen still has something on it. A closing act that fades to an empty stage is the page apologising for existing.

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3. The tell-someone test

Before building, complete this sentence:

it's the site where ___

Then look at what filled the blank.

• "it has a scrub video" is a device name. No memory hook yet.
• "the background changes colour" is a device name wearing a description.
• "you dive to the bottom of the ocean and the pressure readout keeps climbing" is an experience. That is a hook.
• "you drag the letters of the logo apart and they snap back perfectly" is an experience. That is a hook.

The blank has to be something that happened to the visitor, phrased from their side. If the sentence only makes sense to someone who has read the build folder, it fails.

This sentence goes in BRIEF.md, and the signature move from uniqueness.md §3 usually lives inside it. If the signature move and the tell-someone sentence point at different moments, one of them is decoration. Merge them, or cut the one that is not the peak.

The test is also the fastest fingerprint check available. If the sentence would be true of an existing build in <workspace>/FINGERPRINTS.md, the page is not new yet.

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4. Being in it, not watching it

A film plays whether you are there or not. The difference between a viewer and a participant is whether the page acknowledges that somebody specific is here: how fast they are moving, where their pointer is, whether they stopped.

Concrete techniques, in this skill's vocabulary:

• Pointer parallax that moves the world, not a card. data-sc-spotlight publishes --sc-mx / --sc-my. Drive a background layer's transform off them instead of a highlight, and the environment shifts as the visitor moves, slightly, the way a real space does when you lean.
• Dwell-triggered detail. Hold still on an act and something further arrives: a caption, a second line, a small annotation. Reward for stopping. Read --sc-p staying constant across a few frames, in the page's own JS, and reveal something that was never needed for comprehension.
• Scroll velocity shaping intensity. Fast scrolling raises grain, blur, chromatic offset, ground saturation. Slow scrolling settles it. The page feels like it is being driven rather than played back, and it costs one derived custom property.
• The page addressing "you" at one moment that lands. Not throughout, which is just copywriting. One line, at the emotional turn, in second person, when the visitor is already implicated. It works because it is the only time.
• A trace of where they have been. Anything that accumulates as they travel, so arriving at the end means having a record rather than reaching a footer.

Embodiment is seasoning. One or two per page. A page that reacts to everything feels haunted, not alive: the visitor stops reading and starts poking, which is the opposite of what any of this is for. Pick the one that serves the peak and leave the rest.

Everything here is gated to (hover: hover) and (pointer: fine) and off under reduced motion, same as the pointer devices. A technique that only exists on desktop cannot be the thing that carries the page's meaning.

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5. Pacing as emotion

Scroll distance is emotional time. It is the only clock this medium has, and it is fully under your control, which makes it the cheapest emotional instrument in the kit and the one most often left at default.

Three rules follow.

A continuous world is the exception to pacing variety. Everything in this section is about a page of acts, where varying the length is how you vary the feeling. A worldflight is one camera move, and a camera that changes speed between legs reads as broken rather than as expressive. There, hold one pace and let the peak carry the shape by being the single long leg. See worldflight.md section 7c.

Give the peak room. The peak act should have the largest span on the page by a visible margin. If every act is 2.2vh, the page has no shape, whatever the curve in BRIEF.md says.

Compress the administrative parts. Specs, logistics, FAQ, credentials: these are information, not experience. Flow sections at short stagger, not pinned acts with dwell. Spending scroll on them is spending the visitor's patience on the part they will not remember.

Silence has to be authored, not left over. An empty screen you meant reads as anticipation. An empty screen you did not mean reads as a page that failed to load, and the harness reports both as dead scroll. If you are using the empty viewport before the peak, say so in BRIEF.md so the verification pass knows the difference.

The total-length budget from SKILL.md still holds at 8 to 14 viewport-heights. Pacing is how that budget is spent, not permission to spend more of it. A page that needs 20vh to land its curve has too many acts, not too little room.

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6. The feel check

A verification pass, run after the harness in SKILL.md Step 5, against the contact sheets and a live scroll. The harness measures whether the page works. This measures whether it does what it was for.

Run it in this order, and do not reread BRIEF.md first. The whole value is in arriving cold.

1. Scroll the page top to bottom at a normal reading pace. Once. No stopping to fix things.
2. Write down what you felt, act by act. One word per act, before looking at anything. If an act produces no word, write nothing for it, because nothing is the finding.
3. Now open BRIEF.md and diff the two curves.

Where they disagree, the page is wrong, not the brief. Rewriting the intended curve to match what got built is the same failure as rewriting a fingerprint row: it turns the artifact into a description of the accident.

Then three specific checks:

• Does the peak read as the peak? On the contact sheet it should be the largest visual change on the page and it should occupy the most scroll room. If a different act is the biggest thing on the sheet, that act is the real peak and the plan lost. Fix the page or admit the new peak in BRIEF.md and give it the budget.
• Is there silence in front of the peak? Look at the act before it. If it is as loud as the peak, the peak has nothing to arrive from.
• Does the end resolve? The last screen should be able to stand still with content on it. Blank final frame, a cue that faded out, or a footer that just begins means the page ended rather than finished.

Two adjacent acts that produced the same word in step 2 is the filler finding from §1, caught late. Cutting one is almost always right, and almost always improves the total length budget at the same time.

Report the diff in the final output: the intended curve, the felt curve, and what you changed. A build that reports them as identical on the first pass either got lucky or did not do the check cold.