TM★

The Lab

⚗ experiments

You found the workshop. This is where I try things the web says you can't do — usually by building the missing piece and seeing what breaks. Everything here is real and running in your browser: drag the pictures, pull the sliders, flip the bones on. Nothing is a mockup.

Rapid fire

Every slip exit on its own gumball machine, each feeding itself as fast as the real machine can, on a loop. For getting the timing right against the next slip coming in.

Let it run →

Slip exits

Twenty-odd ways for the gumball machine's paper slip to go away: a cloth-mesh crumple, a shader burn, a black hole, a shredder, a paper plane, and more. One of them wins the tray.

Make it go away →

Numbers game

Seven machines built from the same fifty facts: the home page's cubes with every knob on the outside, dice tossed from a cup, a screensaver, wreckable cards, slots, a gumball machine, and pinball.

Insert coin →

Label swap

Six ways for a toolbar button to change its mind, raced head-to-head. The dial roll won and now lives on the projects page.

Watch words flip →

Print layout

Everything CSS can honestly do about wrapping text around a picture — floats, carved columns, newsprint — with an X-ray that exposes the invisible machinery.

Show the bones →

The typesetter

A tiny typesetting engine doing what CSS can't: lines split around pictures, justified with real hyphenation on a baseline grid. Knuth–Plass included.

Set some type →

Anchored figures

The typesetter's mirror image: figures anchored to sentences instead of coordinates — the text flows first and the pictures follow it. Resize and watch them ride.

Drop an anchor →

Flourishes

A specimen book of small visual moves: marker swipes, stylish underlines, skewed pops, and blocks that are nothing but color. The winners graduate into the articles.

Pop some color →

Renditions

One real project page, five theses: a dossier with no headings, a poster of numbers, magazine field notes, a timeline, and a playroom. Steal from all of them.

Flip the takes →

Ink methods

Every prose flourish in the book — marker, tilt, skew, ring, squiggle, and ten more — set by the real engine on a phrase long enough to break across lines, where the honest test happens.

See them wrap →