Digital display prototypes
I have been building my about over the last week, and I wanted
it to be slightly "futuristic" so for the links at the bottom of the card, I wanted kinf of a
digital display. It had to be a thin narrow strip that flickers to show the card is powered on.
I wanted to explore few options that would also fit the retro theme going on, so before committing
to one direction I wanted to try several; so I built four, each with its own mechanical idiom.
Every prototype also needs to show my email without getting harvested the second I push this
site live. The address is XOR-encoded at build time, stored as a hex string in a data-cfe attribute, and decoded client-side on interaction. The literal user@host never
appears in the rendered HTML.
Solari Flip-Board
Mechanical split-flap tiles - the kind you still see in old train stations and a few holdout airport boards. On reveal each value scrambles through random glyphs before settling. Hover any field to re-run the clatter. The horizontal hinge line is a background-image trick, not an overlay, so it stays crisp at any zoom.
16-Segment VFD
Vacuum fluorescent display. Every character is 16 SVG polygons; unlit segments stay faintly visible as ghost pixels so you read the unlit grid, not blank space. Amber phosphor flicker, scanlines, soft vignette. The TRANSMIT row shows [ENCRYPTED] until decryption handshakes in ~600ms after mount.
LED Dot-Matrix
Airport-FIDS strip - row numbers, a blinking status LED, a live clock, a slow vertical scan beam. Rows boot in with a staggered fade. The email row shows "[ CLICK TO DECRYPT ]"; click or hover and the real address streams in character-by-character.
CRT Terminal
Amber-on-black console window with a chrome bar, scanlines, and a rare sync-roll that hints at a failing CRT. Lines type in sequentially with a persistent blinking caret. The email is a row of ░ blocks until you hover - then it runs a glyph-scramble decrypt for a PGP-handshake feel.