Still Life

A black floor, and on it a cluster of fruit blown from glass: cherries and currants in garnet, two blackberries in near-black, a pink plum, and one physalis in pale lemon, the one bright thing in the picture. Everything on the page is made of what is in it. Raised is blown glass, a lozenge with one crescent of light along its top and its own thickness showing as a lit rim. Recessed is the void the glass was lifted out of. State is depth, never colour.

Wide slab caps for display, set tight and uppercase, and a plain grotesque for reading. The lemon lands once a screen, on the one word or the one key that matters. Twelve icons, each a hairline object inside a hairline circle, the way a specimen is kept. The look has one move, the ripen: a thing arrives matte and dim and takes its gloss a beat later, the way glass comes up out of the dark when the lamp finds it.

It refuses: a third colour, full-colour photography that is not the picture, gradients standing in for a material, a flat card, an outlined box, a coloured selected state, centred pages that are not the hero, a second accent in one viewport, the lemon on a paragraph, and a paragraph set in the display face.