A durable companion to the design system: the files, the decisions behind them, the deploy path, the font wiring, and the traps to avoid. Written so a future session — or you — can pick up cleanly.
Open the design systemEverything lives in the artifacts folder and persists across sessions. The two that matter for production are the first two; the rest are mockups kept for reference.
The finished Work With Me page. Deployed to prototypes.zaheermerali.com/artifacts/_stealth/work-with-me/. Carries the full verbatim copy plus the glass nav, footer, themes, gallery, infinity loop, and water droplet.
The living reference: themes, tokens, type, ◐ glyph, glass nav + menu, motion vocabulary, components, hanging canvases, the infinity loop, water, and The Mirror (§11). Kept in sync with the production pages.
The reflections index + article pages, generated from Notion by sync/sync-the-mirror.mjs. Shares article.css, article.js, themes.js, icons.js, theme-toggle.js. Do not hand-edit the generated *.html, images/, or icons/ — re-run the sync. Workflow: sync/ADDING-A-POST.md.
Standalone mock of the infinity motion. Now folded into both pages.
Original glass nav + footer mockup.
The trio + serif candidate study (Newsreader won).
◐ lockups and the menu-button animation studies.
--* tokens; a palette swap reskins everything. Theme has light / dark / auto (follows the OS until the toggle overrides).--r-sm 4 / --r-md 8 / --r-lg 12 only. No 999px pills, no thick left-border cards, no glassy blur on content cards. Circles and squares with small radii.cubic-bezier(.4,0,.2,1), water/ripple, and the infinity. No springs, no bounces, no flips. Button press is an instant scale(.96).sync/sync-the-mirror.mjs pulls posts and regenerates the pages (one-directional). Named registries drive per-post choices — POST_THEME (palette), POST_ICON (Lucide icon), POST_PINNED (index pin), POST_LIGHTNESS (default light/dark), DIALOGUE_POSTS (transcript). Images and Lucide icons are downloaded locally at build (Notion S3 URLs expire; self-host to avoid a third-party runtime).--tint + the accent chain across wash, panel, water, marks). Type = content structure from Notion blocks (standard reflection, dialogue/transcript, mixed-media). Any theme on any type.theme-toggle.js cycles light → dark → auto, saves to localStorage (per-browser, incl. mobile), and each page sets its first-load default via data-theme-default. This supersedes the old session-only auto behavior; the design-system and index now share it.<img> (portrait shows fully, no landscape crop); tap/click expands the figure in place (no modal). Reading: no top dek (moved to the closing beat + index card), ~64ch serif measure, larger inked lead-in.og/<slug>.html and registers every generated page in meta.config.json. scripts/generate-og.js (Playwright + sharp, run locally) screenshots the cards to images/og/ and idempotently injects the OG + ◐-favicon blocks. No page ships without a share card.The prototypes host is a static Cloudflare Pages site. Drop the file into an audience folder, run the deploy script, and it goes live behind Cloudflare Access.
cp ".../work/artifacts/work-with-me-v2/index.html" \ ~/Desktop/zaheermerali.com/prototypes-host/artifacts/_stealth/work-with-me/index.html
./deploy.sh — it regenerates the index, commits, and pushes. Cloudflare Pages auto-builds.prototypes.zaheermerali.com. Quick check for "latest": scroll to the Arc section — if the ◐ traces the infinity loop, it's current.Audience = folder. _stealth/ is you-only via Cloudflare Access. Display name comes from the page <title>.
The page links fonts directly (it keeps its own CSS; it does not import the host's LUMA stylesheet, to avoid style bleed).
<link>: League Spartan (Nexa's fallback), Newsreader (italic + optical size), JetBrains Mono.@font-face pointing at the repo: /assets/luma/fonts/Fontfabric_-_Nexa_Regular.otf and …_Heavy.otf (OpenType).200.The Nexa files are .otf (heavier than woff2). If Nexa ever feels slow in production, convert those two files to .woff2 and update the two @font-face src paths.
Two bugs cost real time. Both share one lesson: don't let theme tokens flow into a surface that isn't theme-aware.
Nav tokens like --nav-ink: var(--ink) are declared on :root (the html element). Overriding --ink on body.dark does not reach them, because --nav-ink resolves its var(--ink) at the html level — where it's still the light value. Fix: re-declare --nav-ink, --nav-ink-soft, --nav-accent explicitly inside body.dark.
The paintings/canvases are always warm-paper light. When their text used var(--ink), it turned cream in dark mode → invisible on the light painting. Rule: text on a fixed-light surface stays fixed dark ink; text on a theme-aware surface follows the theme. (We later made the panels fully theme-aware, which removed the tension.)
Always verify rendered output against the design-system page before claiming a match — copying CSS source and assuming parity missed both bugs above.
The Mirror added a few more, worth keeping:
Per-article --tint was applied correctly but nearly invisible — it drove only ~5 rare elements while --accent (theme-neutral gold) drove ~26 prominent ones, so every article looked the same. Fix: the theme drives the whole accent chain (applyTheme sets --accent/--nav-accent/--nav-hairline) and tints large surfaces (page wash, reading panel, water). Lesson: a token only differentiates if it touches a large, prominent surface.
rootMargin:'-70px 0 0 0' throws a SyntaxError that aborts the whole script (the dock + water silently died). Must be '-70px 0px 0px 0px' — every value carries px or %.
The reflective pool is the design-system water engine verbatim (Mirror variant just changes source + cadence + tint). An earlier improvised two-canvas drip had mismatched coordinates and never landed. Lesson: lift the working code, parameterize the difference.
Icon keys must match across the sync's POST_ICON, the download list, and icons.js's inline LUCIDE fallback — all real Lucide file names. When they drifted, every icon fell back to the ◐ glyph. Icons hydrate self-hosted-first, so a missing/renamed file silently degrades.
Everything under the-mirror/*.html, images/, icons/ is written by the sync — hand-edits are lost on the next run. Change the templates (sync/templates/), the shared assets, or the registries instead.
#apply-root link) — front-end here, wired to Notion + Stripe in your own environment..otf → .woff2 for faster loads.