Volta — the company as one circuit

§1 · Concept

The concept

Advisor OS is drawn as a printed circuit board: four products become four ICs with honest part numbers, and the career they serve becomes the one copper trace that connects them in order. A live pulse travels that trace as you scroll — the page is read the way a signal crosses a board, entering each chip at pin 1 and lighting it up.

§2 · Palette

Palette

§3 · Type system

Type system

§4 · Signature element

The live trace

One copper trace is auto-routed down the entire page with right-angle PCB turns, via rings where it changes layer at section boundaries, and a bright test-probe pulse that scrolls with you. When the pulse reaches a chip’s pin 1, that product’s LED lights and its oscilloscope draws the product’s real numbers as measurements. It exists because it is the argument: the four tools are separate components — separate logins, separate prices — joined by exactly one thing, the order of an advisory career. The trace is that order made visible.

§5 · Techniques

Techniques used

• Orthogonal auto-routing in code: the trace path is generated at runtime from the DOM — each IC card exposes an anchor pad, and the route (vertical run, horizontal jog, vertical drop) is computed from measured positions, then rebuilt on resize and after font load.
• Scroll-scrubbed motion along a polyline: arc length is the timeline. A piecewise scroll→length map guarantees the pulse hits each pin 1 exactly when its card sits mid-viewport; stroke-dasharray renders the lit run and the travelling pulse, getPointAtLength drives the probe head, and a lerp smooths the scrub.
• Layered board realism: pads and vias as annular rings, solder glint via radial gradients, an epoxy IC package with a drilled pin-1 notch, fibreglass weave from repeating-linear-gradients.
• SVG oscilloscopes: each product’s numbers drawn as a waveform — square wave, sine, pulse train, four overlaid channels — using pathLength normalisation and a one-shot dashoffset draw-in when the pulse arrives.
• Reduced-motion contract: with prefers-reduced-motion the full trace renders lit, every LED is on and every scope is drawn — a finished board at rest, not a blank one.
• Zero bitmaps: every visual on both pages is CSS or SVG; the only network assets are two Google font families.

§6 · Scorecard

Rubric score — pending final pass