間 · designing with what is left out

KOYŌ, a Kyoto tea house, asked that the site hold silence the way their room does. The design practices ma, the Japanese art of the meaningful interval, with AI-generated ink as its only motion. Designed and built by our AI pipeline in one day.

The ink film

The hero's right panel is a five-second Higgsfield video (kling3_0_turbo, text-to-video): "black sumi ink blooming underwater against off-white, billowing tendrils, slow motion, minimalist Japanese aesthetic." It loops muted under a washi tint. One asset, placed once, carrying the whole page's motion budget.

Vertical type

The title is real tategaki, writing-mode: vertical-rl with mixed text orientation, not rotated text. Latin captions run vertically alongside. The wordmark is a hanko-style seal block in vermillion.

.vertical { writing-mode: vertical-rl; text-orientation: mixed; }

The ensō that draws itself

Scrolling draws a zen circle in SVG: three staggered brush layers (a body stroke and two dry-brush ghosts) animate stroke-dashoffset from the scroll position, easing out as they complete. The stroke stops at 95%, an ensō is never closed.

Quiet mechanics

• Sumi-e scrolls (Higgsfield, regenerated in pass two for full-bleed consistency) hang in kakemono mounts with black rollers, revealed by a left-to-right clip-path wipe like a brushstroke.
• Giant kanji watermarks (茶, 間, 禮) sit at 4.5% opacity and drift on scroll parallax.
• An SVG-turbulence washi grain overlays everything at 50% opacity.
• The palette is four inks: washi, sumi, vermillion, matcha. Nothing else is permitted.

The loop

Three rendered review passes. Pass one exposed the ensō reading as a geometric ring (fixed with layered wobbly strokes) and two scroll paintings that photographed their own paper edges (regenerated with a stricter flat-scan prompt). Pass three added the hover lift on the mounts.