Light Through Paper — AoA Experiments Moodboard

The wall

Ten references, each earning its place for one specific thing. Five are marked as leads — they set the page's composition, surface, imagery, reveal, and motion. The rest support.

Golden-hour light and bamboo shadows across a shoji grid, low wooden bench — GradientLead
Amber falls unevenly

The paper isn't one color — it runs from hot amber to cool grey across a single wall, and the shadow is the only ornament. This is how the emotions live on the page: hidden behind the panels, present only as soft shapes leaning against the light.

Saul Bass-style film poster where rough white letters form the silhouette of a figure carrying a shovel — RevealLead
The shadow is made of words

Bass-school poster logic, and the trick behind the reveal: the silhouette is secretly letterforms. Behind the paper, an emotion's shadow reads first as a figure or shape — only on approach do you sense it's built from type. Never fully legible; the almost-reading is the point.

Luminous wall printed with a misty forest at sunset, person standing before it — WindowLead
The panel is a portal

Soda Studio's lit wall — and the surface rule for the whole page. Tall panels, no wood frames, no lattice: just hairline seams where one panel meets the next. The paper can hold a world behind it and nothing interferes with the light.

Flame-like caustic light patterns cast on plywood by glass blocks — Texture of lightLead
Light itself as texture

Caustics — light bent through glass, moving like reflections off water. This is the motion signature and the secret handshake with the homepage: AoA's ocean returns as slow water-light playing across the paper. Ambience, not pattern fill.

A bare tree seen through an open shoji window, paper lantern lit, fog behind — FrameLead
The frame composes the world

The page's composition in one image: dark at the sides, the world revealed at center. The experiments page holds its content in a lit middle column while the wings stay in shadow — the dark margin is the frame, not any drawn border.

Supporting

Large shoji wall glowing in a dark gallery, stone step in front, single lamp — Light source
The wall is the lamp

The room gives almost nothing; the paper wall carries all the light. This is the page's core move — dark ground, one glowing surface, and an irregular grid that stays quiet because the panels vary in size, not in tone.

Ukiyo-e woodblock print: woman outside a teahouse at night, silhouettes cast on the shoji — Silhouette
Presence, implied

Shōtei-era woodblock. The figures inside exist only as shadows on paper — the story is told without showing anyone's face. For the experiments: suggest the practice, never illustrate it literally.

Fine vertical wooden slats with tree shadows behind, teapot on a round table — Rhythm
Fine vertical measure

A tighter, faster lattice — vertical slats like a rhythm track. Useful for dividers, progress ticks, audio scrubbers: thin repeated lines that let something soft (a tree, a waveform) blur through from behind.

Bonsai and stones in a warm-lit tatami alcove at night — One living thing
Green, rationed

In a world of amber and ink, the bonsai is the only living color — and it's lit like an actor. The principle, not the green, is what transfers: one rationed accent per view (a state, a streak, a completed day) reads as precious instead of decorative.

Figures blurred behind red-orange fluted glass — Heat
The bold cousin

Same grammar — figures behind a ribbed translucent plane — pushed to saturated ember. This is the ceiling of the palette's intensity: reserved for one moment, maybe the door, maybe day 30. Never the resting state.

Pigments

The bridge to AoA: their deep water becomes the dark room, their orange becomes the lantern behind the paper. Everything cold in this palette is water; everything warm is light — never paint.

Night Ink

#0D1A21

AoA's ocean after dark. Page ground.

Deep Water

#29505C

The hero teal, submerged. Frames, shadows, secondary surfaces.

Washi

#EFDFB2

Lit paper. Panels, headings.

Lantern

#F09A38

AoA orange as light source. Actions, focus, the glow.

Ember

#C25B2A

Heat ceiling. One moment only.

Sea Fog

#A9BCBB

Mist through the window. Muted text, hairlines, idle states.

The bridge

Nibras's style guide (30 Jul) coupled with the direction. The argument, demonstrated by derivation rather than assertion: every warm tone on our page is their orange behaving as light on their navy — never as paint.

AoA Navy 1

#34465C

Card/section ground. Gradient stop A.

AoA Navy 2

#32334E

Darker navy, gradient pairing.

AoA Navy 3

#323D4D

Gradient stop B (45° from top-left).

AoA Orangeverified

#F5931B

CTA orange from production CSS. Our Lantern sits a half-step paler.

AoA Cobaltverified

#026696

Their link/hover blue, from production CSS.

Off-whiteverified

#FAFAFA

Their light ground. Unused here — our light is washi.

Text dark

#333 @ 80%

Body on light grounds.

Text light

#FFF @ 80%

Body on dark grounds.

Their ground, exactly as specced: 45° navy gradient, body text at 80% white, CTA in orange.

Get toolkit

As specced

The brand baseline — navy gradient and orange used as paint, the way the main site does it.

Derivation 1

The same orange, recast as light: a lantern bleeding through their navy. Nothing new was added — one brand color at falling opacities over their own gradient.

Derivation 2

Push the glow hotter and washi appears by itself: the paper tone is what their orange does at the core of the light, falling off into night ink. Our palette is their palette, lit.

JOY

The coupling

An experiment panel on brand ground: frameless washi with seams only, lantern bloom at its heart, an emotion's shadow — letterforms that don't quite resolve — leaning on the paper. Their navy, our room.

How it becomes the page

Translation rules — from the wall to the experiments redesign.

Dark wings, lit center

The page composes like Frame: night-ink wings at the sides, the content revealed in a lit middle column. The ground is AoA's deep water after sundown — faint grain, no pure black. Each experiment is a frameless washi panel glowing out of that dark, not a card sitting on it.

Seams, not frames

No wood, no borders, no kumiko grid. Panels are tall and frameless — the only structure is a hairline seam where one meets the next, and the dark room does all the framing. The fine slat rhythm survives only in instruments: audio scrubbers, progress ticks, the 30-day rail.

Emotions live behind the paper

No photos, no illustration of people practicing. Emotions appear as shadows against the light — and the shadows are secretly words: letterforms composing a figure or a relevant shape, blurred by the paper so they never quite resolve into reading. A form that stirs while audio plays, stills when it ends.

Light moves like water

The motion signature is caustics — slow reflections of water playing across the paper, AoA's ocean returning as light. Panels warm on hover, transitions ease like a lamp turning up, the water-light drifts at minutes-scale. Nothing snaps; reduced-motion rests at the lit state.

Type as brush and chisel

A mincho-style serif carries titles — vertical stress, calligraphic entry strokes, set generously on washi. A quiet geometric sans does labels and controls in letterspaced caps. Ink-on-paper contrast, never grey-on-grey.

One flame per view

Each screen gets a single brightest point — the lantern. On the index it's the current day's panel; inside an experiment it's the play button or the writing field. Everything else steps back a stop so the eye lands without being told.

What this is not

Not a "japandi" template: no literal wood-grain fills, no bamboo clip-art, no red circle logos, no brush-font headlines. The reference is light through material — if an element could exist as a sticker, it's off-board. When in doubt, remove the object and keep its shadow.