method
a bender draws the route of the glass at full size before touching the tube. the drawing is not preparation for the work, it is half of the work, and it is the half anyone can check afterwards. that is the whole method here.
the four stages
01
the drawing
i read what you have, measure it, and write down what it does today: weight, speed, contrast, the keyboard path, and what a stranger understands in twenty seconds. you get the measurements as files, not as a slide.
02
the bend
the identity. the mark, the ramp with a computed contrast figure for every pair it uses, the type scale with four numbers per role, and the rules for what to do when two of them disagree.
03
the run
the build. static output, hand written css, no framework, no third parties, to a weight budget that is published on the page and enforced by the build. the build fails when a page goes over.
04
the strike
handover. the repository, the deploy, the tokens, and a measurement file with dates, hardware and the list of what is still unknown. nothing depends on me afterwards.
this door is where the second colour on this site comes from. it measures oklch(0.640 0.106 215) and the whole method section is tinted to that hue.
the five things measured
each one names its instrument, its device, its network and its date. a number without those four is an opinion with a decimal point in it.
weight
bytes over the wire per page, gzipped, counting every asset the page actually references. measured from the built output, not estimated from the source.
speed
largest contentful paint and cumulative layout shift, on a named device profile under applied throttling. lab data, labelled as lab data.
task time
a real person completing the thing the page exists for, keyboard only, timed. on one job that came out at 22.0 seconds.
contrast
every text and ground pair actually used, computed from the hex values with the wcag relative luminance formula. not sampled from a screenshot.
keyboard access
the whole path walked with the mouse unplugged: every control reachable, every focus state visible, nothing trapped.
what is not measured
click through, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, time on page, scroll depth, heat maps. those measure how much can be extracted from the person on the other end. the five above measure how well that person is treated.
whether the work is any good is also not measured. a contrast ratio is a floor, not a ceiling, and no number here says the thing is beautiful. that judgement is yours and you should make it by looking.
the numbers are not the point. they are how the point is kept from leaking out between the first conversation and the last one.
the pattern
the drawing is mirrored because the glass is bent face down on it. a bender's pattern carries a fixed vocabulary and nothing else: an electrode at each end, a hatch over every run that is painted out, a mark at each bend, a length for each section of glass, and a title block. the drawing below carries the tube route, the electrodes, a tick at each of the forty four bends, and the four dark letters drawn for position. its title block is the line underneath it.
one jumper crosses the e to feed the eye, which is a closed run. the four dark letters are drawn for position only.