Lab — concept build
Anchor: cyanotype-drafting
Every job starts as a drawing.
A demonstration of what a builder's website could be. The firm is invented; the argument is not. Pull the handle in the frame below and the drawing becomes the building.
Not client work. Meridian Line Building Works does not exist and no contractor was involved. This is a demonstration of what a builder's website could do, so every figure in its trust panel is invented, the coverage map is a drawing rather than a place, and nothing on the page is a photograph.
01 — The shell, drawn as you scroll
Line work in a browser is a few hundred coordinates, not an image. It draws itself, it stays sharp on any screen, and it costs less than the icon set on most builders' sites.
02 — Drawing, and built
Most builders' sites put two photographs side by side and hope you can tell which is which. This is one frame with a seam through it. Press anywhere and pull — or focus the handle and use the arrow keys.
Both halves are one set of coordinates rendered twice — a front elevation of a house with a single-storey rear extension, as line work with its dimensions on the left and as a rendered building on the right. Nothing here is a photograph.
03 — The panel
Licensed. Insured. Trusted. Those three words sit on every builder's website and not one of them can be checked. A badge is a picture of a claim. A number beside the register that issued it is a claim somebody can go and look up, which is a different thing entirely — so the panel reads like an instrument face and every row carries where its figure came from.
Specimen values. Meridian Line does not exist, so every figure below is invented — including the licence, which is why it is set as text and not linked into a real state register. On a live build each source line is the link that settles it.
- Licence class
- B
- General building — state register
- General liability
- ACTIVE
- Certificate issued by the carrier
- Years trading
- 18
- Register, first date of issue
- Jobs closed out
- 412
- Own records
- Jobs returned to
- 3
- Own records — revisited under warranty
04 — Write the scope yourself
"Get in touch" produces a phone call that starts from nothing. Tick what applies and the page assembles the schedule of works a builder would have written down anyway. Take it to the enquiry and the first conversation starts from the second question.
Schedule of works
Nothing ticked yet. Choose above and the sheet writes itself.
05 — Where the crew goes
An embedded map is a third-party script, a consent banner and a fifth of a megabyte spent drawing a circle around a yard. This is the circle. It is drawn in the same line work as the elevation, it loads with the page, and the three distances are printed as text beside it so the drawing is never the only way to read them.
| Zone | Band | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A | Radius 15 km | Surveyed and quoted |
| B | Radius 35 km | Surveyed and quoted |
| C | Radius 60 km | By arrangement |
06 — What this piece is
The drawing becomes the building
A drag-reveal built for a thumb before a mouse, on a page where every image is drawn rather than photographed — one set of coordinates rendered twice, so the before and the after are provably the same building.
A builder’s whole business is turning a drawing into a structure. The page does that literally: line work draws itself as you scroll, and a handle you pull across a frame takes the drawing off a finished building.
The reveal is the part worth arguing about. Every builder’s site has a
before-and-after, and almost all of them are two photographs sitting beside
each other, which asks a visitor to hold one image in their head while looking
at the other. One frame with a seam through it asks nothing — and it is the
one interaction on the page that has to work with a thumb in sunlight, which
is why it is driven by Pointer Events, why a press anywhere in the frame
counts as a grab, and why pointercancel is handled as an ordinary way for a
drag to end rather than as an edge case.
Nothing here is photographed, and that was not a constraint to work around. A photograph of a real building on a page about a firm that does not exist is fabricated proof; a licensed photograph on a commercial page is a bill waiting to arrive; and the production content-security policy refuses a remote image outright. Drawn as SVG the elevation is a few kilobytes, it stays sharp at any density, it can animate its own strokes — and both halves of the reveal are generated from a single set of coordinates, so the finished building is provably the drawing rather than merely resembling it.
The trust panel is the other argument. Licensed, insured, trusted sits on every builder’s website and not one word of it can be checked. A badge is a picture of a claim. A licence class beside the register that issued it is a claim somebody can go and look up — so the panel is built as an instrument face with a source under every figure, and the figures are labelled as specimen values rather than linked into a real register, because linking an invented number into a real one would be the exact fabrication the piece exists to argue against.
- Build time, measured
- 58 min
- Anchor
- cyanotype-drafting
- Imagery
- Drawn, none photographed
- Status
- Concept — not delivered work