The Hasselblad direction, blended rather than copied — current lean, 2026-08-22. We keep our own warm amber and softer shapes so it doesn't read as a Hasselblad tribute, and take the things worth taking: engraved tracked type, data set like an instrument readout, and the accent budget — grey until something matters. Click a name in §03 to try it on everywhere. Nothing here is wired to the engine.
01 Palette & materials
Five candidate shifts. Under the blend, the first two are declined — we keep our blue-black darks and the warm amber, which is most of what stops this reading as a Hasselblad clone. What carries over is the discipline: the accent is rationed — one index, one action, silence everywhere else — and hierarchy comes from spacing, not colour.
Current
Proposed
02 Typography
Two voices only. Archivo is the engraving — wide-tracked caps, never bold, hierarchy carried by size and letter-space. Barlow Semi Condensed is the readout — the DIN-flavoured numerals every camera OSD is set in. Body text stays quiet. Nothing else gets in. Neither is a Hasselblad font — theirs are proprietary; these are free Google faces chosen for the same character, which suits the blend: the flavour without the fingerprint.
Hints and tips stay in sentence case at 400 — the quiet voice that explains why f/16 starved the sensor.
03 The name
Round two hunted double meanings: a photography term that is also a game word (round one — Three Dials, Middle Grey, Full Manual, Full Stop, Sunny 16 — is recorded in PLAN.md §12 and didn't land). Shortlist, 2026-08-22: All the Stops and Dialed In. Decided 2026-09-03: All the Stops, anchored on allthestops.app — pricing broke the tie (PLAN.md §12). The rest stay as bench, not cuts. Every bare .com is long gone, so the play is .game / .app. Click one to wear it — the page opens wearing the chosen name.
04 Surfaces
The four surfaces a player actually lives in, re-set. Static mockups — real numbers from Dusk Rider, none of it wired to the engine.
A cyclist rolls past the café at dusk — freeze him sharp and make him pop from the background. You're handheld tonight: below ~1/30 the whole frame shakes. Light is fading. Something has to give.
Decided: the traffic-light language stays — green for earned, amber for the goal that cost points, red for failure. It's the universal grade, and the scene stays the most colourful thing on screen regardless. The monochrome card is kept only as a reference.
05 Beyond the re-skin — UX moves
A new coat of paint is the smallest part of this. These are the moves that would make the game easier to read and more pleasurable to retry, ordered by how much they'd matter. Each is a Phase D candidate, not a commitment.
The verdict lands on the photograph
Today the score card renders below the top plate — below the fold, a scroll away from the shot it judges. Chimping is the loop: shoot, look, adjust. The card should arrive on or beside the captured frame, so shot and verdict are one glance, and "adjust & retry" is right there under your cursor.
One instrument panel
Settings tag bottom-left, mode tag top-right, a small meter bottom-centre — three corners to watch. Dock them into a single readout strip under the frame (§04 shows it) and the meter finally gets the size a teaching instrument deserves. One place to look while both hands are on the dials.
A contact sheet of your attempts
Every shot this session becomes a frame on a strip — settings, score, the best one marked. Retrying stops feeling like failing and starts looking like a session; comparing frames is how photographers actually learn; and found routes get a natural home.
Dials under your thumbs
The mobile layout was adapted under time pressure, not designed (PLAN.md already owns this): scene up top, the top plate docked to the bottom edge, dials inside the thumb arc, shutter release at the right where a grip would be. One-handed play or it isn't mobile. Phone playtest, 2026-08-22: dragging works, but a row of three makes the dials too small — go 2×2 (aperture, shutter / ISO, release) so each dial gets real diameter.
Teach the controls by touch, not footnote
"Drag, scroll, or arrow keys" currently lives in a footer. First visit: the aperture dial gives one slow tick-tick wiggle; a hint chip appears on first focus, then never again. This is the wordless onboarding Phase D asks for, started at the dial where confusion starts.
Considered and declined: live per-goal feedback
Showing goal scores ticking before the shot would turn every level into needle-chasing and collapse the trade-off space into one right answer — the thing the design commitments exist to prevent. The scene responding live is the preview. Judgment only arrives after you commit.
06 Rules of restraint
The part of this page that survives into the real skin — the identity as constraints, not swatches.
Orange is rationed: at most three per screen. The index mark, the primary action, the earned star. If a fourth thing wants orange, one of the others loses it.
Data is always the readout. Settings, scores, EV — white-on-black, Barlow, tabular. Numbers never appear in body type; prose never appears in the readout.
Caps are tracked, never bold. Weight stops at 600. Hierarchy comes from size, spacing and silence — engraving doesn't shout.
Corners ≤ 8px; separation by hairline, not shadow. Depth effects are reserved for things that are physically deep: the dials, the shutter release, the iris.
Gradients only describe metal. If a gradient isn't standing in for machined graphite catching light, it's decoration — cut it.
The scene is the only picture. The UI stays monochrome so the illustrated scene is the most colourful thing on screen, always.