Cold Open

A gas-station canopy at blue hour, its underside lit, nothing else on for miles. The sky is still blue and the page is that sky. The interface is signage: raised is a lightbox, milk acrylic lit from inside in an aluminium retainer, and recessed is the channel it sits in. Anything selected goes dark. One red lamp per screen, the one on the fascia.

An original display face, Forecourt, a wide squared gothic with superellipse rounds and flat terminals, drawn from scratch and bundled only. A plain body face for reading. Twelve service-sign pictograms, solid fills and hard corners, one drawing each. Nothing slides in: everything switches on the way a fluorescent tube starts, a flicker, a second flicker, then steady.

It refuses: a second accent, a third material, the canopy behind body copy, a centred page, a curve in a pictogram, motion that eases in, and a paragraph in Forecourt.