Rey’s Lab

3 experiments · 1 open

The Lab

Perceptual questions need an instrument, not an argument. So: build the candidates, deploy them, look at them on a phone, and let the winner be obvious. An experiment is a question answered that way, ending in a dated verdict — if it has no candidates and no verdict, it is a blog post instead. Every experiment names the project it was run for; the ones marked Rey’s Lab are this site, which has no other project page.

Experiments

Dated and, once settled, frozen — a record, never updated to match the site. That is what stops the lab drifting into theme-park territory: a section containing only finished, dated work has nothing left to keep embellishing. An abandoned experiment leaves a permanent gap in the numbering, which is honest and is the price of the sequence.

Experiment 02

Rey’s Lab

The hero signature

Whether the name carries a multi-hue gradient, and drawn from what. Six fills including no fill at all, at the size they would ship at.

Open
Experiment 03

Rey’s Lab

The primary action

Ten candidates, and the winner was not in the grid. The question looked like which treatment and hue the primary should take; it was really a rule the pair never had — a fill means primary, so the secondary never gets one.

Settled

2026-09-21

Experiment 01

Rey’s Lab

Choosing a palette

Four palettes built, three judged at full-screen scale, violet c won. Frozen: the losing palettes still render there and nowhere else on the site.

Settled

2026-09-20

Reference

The opposite contract to an experiment: these are maintained, and always show the site as it is now. They are noindex — a wall of swatches with no narrative makes a poor search landing page — but reachable from here, because the contrast matrix is worth verifying rather than taking on trust.

2 faces

Type

Outfit over IBM Plex Mono. The full specimen, the micro-label tracking ramp and the scale — the place to check a size before it ships.

13 tokens · 28 pairs

Colour

Violet c as live token swatches, plus a contrast matrix computed in the page against WCAG AA — the minimum text-contrast standard.

9 steps · 5 accents

Scale

The palette plotted by brightness, colourfulness and hue. A measurement rather than a specification — including the finding that its steps are eleven times apart, which is why it is not generated.

8 components

Components

The pieces that actually recur: project card, list row, micro-label, code block, link states, timeline node.

Instrument readout

The lab concept, kept honest: these are real build values, not decorative chrome. The reference site this borrows from is dense because it has live numbers — density without data is fake.

Build
2026-09-24 21:14 UTC
Astro
7.3.3
Tailwind
4.3.3
Typeface
Outfit + Plex Mono
Palette
violet c
Output
static / no adapter
Experiments
2 settled · 1 open
Routes
19
AA floor
4.5:1 held