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Design guideMachine Nº 11 — “Kinetic”

Kinetic.

A Bauhaus machine poster that actually runs

§ 01

Concept

A Bauhaus machine poster that actually runs: the advisory career as a gear train — four meshing gears, one drive, cranked by scroll. Geometry, flat primaries and mechanical truth: every ratio on the page is real gear maths from visible tooth counts, and every number engraved on a rim is a real product number.

§ 02

Palette

Warm poster paper, black structure, pure primaries used flat. Red is owned by structure — rules, kickers, the start switch. Blue and yellow serve as poster blocks. The four product colours appear only as small hub dots on the gears.

Poster paper
#f4efe6
Ink / structure
#16130f
Machine red
#d5372d
Poster blue
#2b5aa7
Poster yellow
#e9b32a
CMFAS Prep #2dd4bf Pick a Time #7aa2ff ActivityTracker #ff6b3d FourLens #b79bff
§ 03

Type system

Archivo Black · display
hero, headings, numerals
Four gears. One drive.
Archivo Black · poster numerals
index 1–4, hub caps, ratio band
1 2 3 4
Archivo 400–700 · body
ledes, panel copy, manual answers

Four products, one per function of an advisory business, meshed in the order a career runs.

Archivo 700 · spec labels
tracked caps, rims, rate plate

3,684 questions · 9 papers · 104 chapters

§ 04

Signature element

The gear train. Four SVG gears — Z 24, 32, 20, 28, one per product — generated parametrically in code with involute-ish tooth flanks, placed so pitch circles are exactly tangent, and phase-solved so teeth genuinely mesh. Scroll drives the first gear; the rest follow by the coupling law, so all motion on the page is mechanically true, not choreographed to look true.

Why: Advisor OS sells sequence — get licensed, fill the calendar, do the work, read the room. A gear train is the one image where order, coupling and honest ratios are the same thing. Each product's real numbers are engraved on its rim; its price is stamped on the static hub cap; its colour appears only as hub dots.

Live specimen — Z 24 driving Z 16ratio 1.500 : 1, reversed
ω₂ = −ω₁ · z₁/z₂   // coupling law  ·  train ratios 1.000 → −0.750 → 1.200 → −0.857
§ 05

Techniques

  1. 01

    Parametric SVG gear generation

    Tooth outlines built in code from module and tooth count: quadratic Bézier flanks through the pitch circle, arc tips and roots. No drawn assets anywhere on the site — every image is SVG or CSS.

  2. 02

    Coupled-rotation maths

    ω₂ = −ω₁·z₁/z₂ chained across the train, plus a mesh-phase solver that aligns each follower's tooth gap to its driver's nearest tooth along the centre line.

  3. 03

    Scroll-driven drive with flywheel drift

    Scroll position cranks the master angle; scroll velocity charges a flywheel that decays over a second or two to a slow constant idle, so the machine never quite stops.

  4. 04

    Pinned scenes

    A sticky full-viewport stage over a 540vh track, with GSAP ScrollTrigger progress scrubbing the framing: each product's gear is translated and scaled to the visual centre while its spec panel holds, on straight tracks with mechanical timing.

  5. 05

    Poster-grade typographic scale

    Archivo Black at clamp(58px, 10.4vw, 152px) against 11px tracked caps; ruled bars, index numerals and a colophon as poster furniture; one 12° rotated baseline moment in the hero.

  6. 06

    Rim engraving via textPath

    Each gear's real product numbers repeat around a circular text path inside the rotating group, so the facts physically turn with the machine.

  7. 07

    Reduced-motion + fallback discipline

    prefers-reduced-motion (or a failed library load) swaps the whole mechanism for a static pose: full train at a handsome angle, panels laid out in flow, drift off. overflow-x: clip on html and body keeps transient transforms from widening phones.

§ 06

Scorecard

Rubric score — pending final pass