The lights come up on the Lab.

If Studio and Lab are the same room at different light levels, walking in should feel like the lights coming up — not like stepping into a different world. The Lab therefore needs to be lit: lunar grey ground, graph paper under the feet, aubergine ink on top, shadows because there's a source.

v0.2 (April 2026): tuning after first viewing. Paper warmed (hue shifted toward yellow), ink darkened, grid finer (12 px with major lines every 60 px), paper grain stronger, vignette added so the centre of the page catches more light. New .ink-text utility gives headlines a subtle deboss so type reads as pressed into the paper. Site header and footer now adapt to Lab context via :has(.paper-ground) instead of staying as a stranded dark band.

v0.3 (April 2026): paper styling moved from the .paper-ground div to body itself (still detected via :has()) — the sheet now extends seamlessly under the header and footer with no white band. Header in Lab context drops the global nav and shows just the logo and a single back link: Back to Studio from the plaza, Back to Lab from any sub-page. The Lab is its own world; cross-section nav lives in the Studio. The grid now scrolls with the document while the spotlight gradient stays fixed to the viewport — the paper moves under the light rather than the light following the paper.

Three pieces, introduced together:

1. 1New token foundation. Deep aubergine as the root, everything else derived via oklch(from …). Obsidian, lunar grey, paper, ink, saffron, coral all expressed relatively — future hue-shift propagates. Fibonacci scale (0.382 / 0.618 / 1 / 1.618 / 2.618 …) for spacing and radius.
2. 2Paper ground utility. A .paper-ground class: lunar grey with a 30-px graph-paper grid at 7% opacity, plus a barely-there noise overlay so the surface reads as paper, not LCD.
3. 3Paper cards.Off-white cards with soft drop shadows (no borders) and a hue-tinted radial glow behind each — the "museum-exhibit spotlight." On hover, shadow lifts and spotlight intensifies.

Applied to the plaza and to this room (including both earlier iterations). The other Lab rooms — the Design journey, AI in Authoring, Media — still have their old dark treatment and will migrate in their own iterations.

• /lab — plaza: five paper doors on a lunar-grey floor, each with its own spotlight hue.
• /lab/making-this — this room and its iteration pages.

• Does the graph paper read as paper, or as too-obviously a grid?
• Are the per-door hues strong enough to signal "each room has its own atmosphere" — or do they disappear against paper?
• Do the shadows feel like they're cast by a source, or just decorative?
• Does the transition from warm saffron Studio to cool lunar Lab feel like "lights coming up in the same room" or like "walking into a different space"?
• Should the plaza hero sit on paper or on a slightly different surface (e.g., bare lunar grey without grid, to feel like the "reception floor")?

• Migrate the Design journey (13 chapters) to the paper ground.
• Migrate AI in Authoring (room + 5 experiment detail pages).
• Migrate Media (room with 2 field notes).
• Introduce the Poet + Engineer typography duet (Iteration 04).
• Perspective scroll — a subtle Z-axis recession as content scrolls up. Described in the brainstorm, deferred for now.

Pending. Writing once the paper ground has been lived with and the Studio → Lab transition has been watched a few times.