Six in the morning, mist on the water

The photograph the hero banner is loosely based on was taken just after six one morning in early spring, when the mist was still sitting low over the water and hadn't yet burned off in the sun. It's the kind of light that only lasts about twenty minutes before it changes completely.

We'd gone down to the river with no particular plan, just a flask of tea and the vague idea of getting some reference material for the site's colors. The blues and greens we ended up using across the whole design came almost directly from that one stretch of water on that one morning.

What didn't make it into the final artwork was a heron standing dead still at the water's edge for a good ten minutes, apparently waiting for something we never saw catch. It felt too specific a detail to draw into a header meant to feel calm and a little generic in the best sense.

Mornings like that are really the whole reason this site looks the way it does. Everything from the palette to the pacing of the games is trying, in some small way, to hold onto that particular kind of stillness for a bit longer than twenty minutes at a time.

If you've got a favorite quiet spot near water yourself, we'd genuinely like to hear about it through the contact page. It's not research for anything in particular, just curiosity about where other people go to slow down.