Tidewrack

The brief

Build a modern editorial website where typography and writing do the work, and make the reading itself feel designed.

The idea

A magazine about the coast should behave like one. A live tide reading runs under the masthead, and a band of blue rises up the edge of the page as you read, so that finishing an article means the tide has come in.

Decisions

• Everything is set in the two inks of the illustrations, so type and image are visibly from one press.
• Gloock gives the masthead the swagger of a heavy nineteenth-century poster face.
• The tide table is calculated from real harmonic constituents.
• The essay holds an awkward position honestly: I would prefer the octopus not to exist, and I would be delighted to find one.

How it came together

1. Researched the 1997 Tokio Express spill and the strandline ecology around it.
2. Wrote the essay first and designed the page around its pull quotes.
3. Removed two details from the draft that could not be verified.

How it works

Static HTML with hash routing and no framework. The tide is a sum of three cosines. The band up the page edge is driven by scroll position and respects reduced-motion settings.