Batch 03 · 240 pens · ships Feb 2027
Eighteen waves.
One steady line.
The Meridian 18 is a piston-fill fountain pen with a hand-ground gold nib and a barrel engraved on a 1904 rose engine. We make 240 a year. Reserve yours for a €60 deposit.
01 — The pen
Made to write the same line on page one and page four hundred.
- 01
Nib
14k gold
Ground by hand in EF, F, M, B and a 1.1 mm stub. Every nib is tuned on our own paper before it is fitted.
- 02
Feed
18 fins
Turned ebonite, one fin for every band on the barrel. It buffers a full page with the pen held nib-down in a warm pocket.
- 03
Barrel
9 hours
Cast resin engraved on a 1904 rose engine. Eighteen waves, cut one pass at a time, so no two barrels drift alike.
- 04
Fill
1.6 ml
A brass piston that draws about forty-two A5 pages at a fine nib. No converter, no cartridge, nothing to lose.
02 — How this page was steered
One lane, chosen before a line of shader was written.
A pre-launch reservation page for a craft object. The steering matrix allows Lane A or B; the brand is quiet and analogue, so the field stays behind the copy and the button stays the loudest thing on screen.
- Lane AChosen
Subtle depth field
A reservation page for a quiet object. Slow bands sit behind the copy and never compete with the button.
- Lane BRejected
Data / particle intelligence
Particle networks say "system". A pen is a hand tool; flowing nodes would borrow credibility it does not need.
- Lane CLater
Object-centric 3D
Right for the launch film, wrong for a waitlist. A turntable model before the photographs exist would oversell the pen.
- Lane DRejected
Immersive cinematic
Volumetrics and post FX to sell 240 pens is a budget mismatch, and a phone in a café would pay for it.
Visual spec
- Palette
- Paper #EFE9DD · Ink #1D2A48 · Nib beam #E0502C
- Motion
- 18 bands drift at 0.18 rad/s; the nib beam crosses the page in 16 s. Amplitude ≤ 3.5 % of the viewport height.
- Composition
- Copy in the upper half, field in the lower half, readout pinned to the frame. Bands fade out before they reach the headline.
Stack & tier
- Renderer
- Raw WebGL 1, one fragment shader on a full-screen triangle. No Three.js: there is nothing to scene-graph.
- Risk tier
- Low. 18 loop iterations per pixel, no textures, no post-processing.
- Fallback
- The SVG poster above the fold is the same bands, built at compile time. The canvas fades in only after its first frame.
Quality gates · read from this page, now
- MessageHeadline and button sit on flat paper at 13.5 : 1 (body copy 5.2 : 1)pass
- Pixel ratiomin(devicePixelRatio, 1.5)cap
- MotionChecking prefers-reduced-motion……
- RendererChecking WebGL……
- Frame timeMeasured while the hero is visible…
- ReliabilityPauses when hidden or off-screen; restores on context lossarmed
- 01 MVP
Paper colour, copy, button and the SVG poster of the eighteen bands. Ships and converts with no script at all.
- 02 Enhance
One fragment shader on a full-screen triangle draws the same bands, now drifting, plus the nib beam.
- 03 Guard
DPR cap 1.5, pause when hidden or scrolled away, context-loss restore, a still frame under reduced motion.
- 04 Stop
No bloom, no particles, no model. The next idea goes in a different section, never in the hero.
03 — Batch 03
Reserve one of 240.
€480 in full, €60 now. We write to you when your barrel comes off the engine, with a photograph of its waves, and you pay the rest only if you still want it.
173 of 240 still open