Virginia P. PaysonWebsites and applications, designed and built

Private chef & catering

A chef working the Roaring Fork Valley — private dinners, mountain celebrations, full event catering — needed a site that read like the work rather than like a template. The brief that mattered was not a feature list: it was that the thing should look considered, hold up beside the photography, and never feel like a page anyone could have generated.

The type does the work. Google Sans Flex, set wide in weight rather than wide in size — a 400 first line against an 800 second line, so the emphasis lives in the contrast instead of in a bigger headline — with a short accent rule above each section the way a magazine marks a new department. The band under the header is a φ series: the first bar is 45% of the viewport, each next one the previous divided by φ, and they are generated until they fill the width. Its colours are not picked. They are derived from the single accent colour in OKLCH, as three analogous families thirty degrees apart read across nine tonal steps, so changing one hex re-tunes the whole band and it stays perceptually even.

Investigation wall

A corkboard-and-string wall, built for the browser. Entities become nodes you can drag, retitle and annotate in place; related nodes collect into clusters; clusters sit inside zones that carry their own colour and label. The whole board is one self-contained HTML file — no build, no dependencies, nothing to install — so a copy of it is a copy of the investigation.

The interesting constraint was that the people using it are not developers and the board changes constantly, so every edit happens on the board itself rather than in a settings screen somewhere: click a node to retitle it, drag to re-group, and the same colour panel that styles one node styles the zone it sits in. Layout and theming are CSS custom properties throughout, which is what lets a palette change propagate without a line of JavaScript recalculating anything.

The Lemmon Docière

The same wall grown into a live, shared case board. Every edit saves to a server and follows you to any browser or device; the last fifty versions are kept, so any change can be rolled back. Source documents open straight from the nodes that cite them, and a video panel pulls a channel's feed in without an API key — sorted by views, embedded in place.

Golden Section Palette

Pick a colour and watch the golden rectangle build itself — thirteen squares, each one the short side of whatever rectangle is left, rotating right, top, left, bottom, with a quarter-circle arc per square tracing the spiral over the top. They are toned by size: the large squares take the deep values and the small inner ones the pale tints, so the composition has somewhere for the eye to rest.

The colour is two algorithms, not one. Hue comes from the classical wheel harmonies — monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split, triad, tetrad and key colour — which are plain rotations of 30°, 90°, 120°, 150° and 180°. Everything else is OKLCH: the picked hex is converted through the Oklab matrices, every family is run up the same nine-step lightness ladder, and each step is converted back to sRGB. That is why a triad holds together — its three legs land at the same lightness, which a rotation in HSL does not guarantee. φ governs proportion, and the whole set exports as CSS custom properties.

Colour Theory Wheel

The same harmonies the traditional way, and a teaching tool as much as a generator. Six modes — monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triad, tetrad — each drawn on the wheel with a plain-English note on when it works, plus the tints and shades of every hue it hands you. Hover a harmony to expand it, click any swatch to copy, take the set as CSS variables.

Deliberately built on HSL rather than OKLCH: this one is about the wheel as colour theory has always taught it, so the maths should be the maths people already know. The Golden Section Palette is where the perceptual version lives.

Resonance Engine

Play a frequency and watch it take shape. Tones are tuned to A432 and drawn as water cymatics in WebGL, the surface tinted by that tone's own colour octave. The harp voice is a plucked string modelled note by note rather than a sample, so it rings and decays like the real thing, and every pitch is mapped against its musical note, brainwave band and colour.

It runs with no server behind it at all — the synthesis, the shader and the mode arithmetic are all in the page, so it still plays years from now with nothing upstream alive.