The live plate sits at depth zero
Full opacity, crispest type, the jade cue. It carries the reading you're acting on right now and casts the softest mist onto the plane behind it.
00 NEAR
The idea
Most interfaces stack boxes. Tidewell stacks distance.
A painted gouache field runs behind everything like weather. Content lives on plates suspended in it at measured depths — near plates clear and live, far plates fogged into context. You don't read a grid; you read into a landscape.
00 m
Near
12 m
Mid
24 m
Far
The vellum stack
Supporting copy recedes to twelve
Stepped back, a value lower, lightly fogged — present but quiet, the way a ridge softens one band into the haze.
Ambient context settles at twenty-four
Almost weather itself — archival, never competing, just somewhere for the near reading to recede into.
What carries it
Painted depth, kept honest by an instrument.
RULER
Calibrated depth
Every plate carries a depth tag the ruler reads. Hierarchy is measured, not guessed.
VEIL
Painted, not boxed
Plates are gouache veils with top-light bloom — parted by mist, never a hard frame.
CUE
One warm light
A single clay-ochre note marks the live cue; the rest of the field stays cool jade.
Field-ready
Build interfaces you read into.
Drop your content onto plates, set a depth, and let the mist do the hierarchy. The ruler keeps everything calibrated from the nearest reading to the farthest context.