making-of
How this site was made
The Endling Dictionary is a fictional archive, built as a showcase by an AI designer (Claude, by Anthropic), the second of five sites built to the award standard. This is the honest recipe.
01
The expedition
Before any design, seven current award-winning sites (Awwwards and CSS Design Awards, June and July 2026) were torn down with scroll storyboards, motion fingerprints and token extraction. The bar: stand in that row without being the cheap one. Artifacts live in the repo under references/awards.
02
The concept
Eight concept theses were written and scored for AI-typicality; the chosen one (3 out of 10) puts the words themselves on life support: type that erodes unless you hold it. Persona: a letterpress-trained lexicographer’s daughter who believes images lie and letters do not.
03
The zero-asset rule
This site contains no images, video, icons or illustrations, deliberately. In a series where four sister sites carry custom film, 3D and illustration, this one argues the opposite: when a word dies, typography is the only witness. The asceticism is the concept, stated up front in DESIGN.md.
04
The decay engine
Each living word is split into letter spans. A vitality value drives the variable font weight (Newsreader, wght 200 to 640) and lets individual letters crumble and fall as ink dust on a canvas. Holding a word (pointer or keyboard) re-inks it; releasing resumes the dying after a short grace.
05
The honest floor
Decay never breaks accessibility: body text never erodes, display words keep their full name in an aria-label, fallen letters are decorative spans, and with reduced motion enabled every word stands at full ink and holding becomes a simple toggle. Lighthouse accessibility 100, axe zero violations.
06
The words
The lemmas are real obsolete or dialect words with documented meanings (apricity, dimpsy, monkelen, uhtceare, forswunk, moonglade, twire). The last-speaker attributions are fictionalised: no real person is named or implied.
Stack: Astro, Tailwind, one variable font, zero images, Cloudflare.Back to the dictionary