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The reading room · Provenance

Prompts and provenance

The honest version, because a showcase should be honest about its making.

No image model was used

Meridian ships zero AI-generated raster. There are no diffusion images, no upscales, no generated textures, and in fact no raster of any kind. Every line, contour, and glyph is a vector: either drawn procedurally by the build-time generator or set in type. There were no image prompts to list, so this page lists the thing that actually made the map instead: its parameters.

Generator parameters

These are the knobs in scripts/gen-map.mjs. The full set is mirrored as text in the repository under prompts/.

Seed
73Deterministic. Change it and the whole world is redrawn.
Canvas
0 0 1600 1000Shared viewBox so all three charts register exactly.
Noise
2 octavesValue noise, 7 + 14 cell grids, smoothstep interpolation.
Winds
184 linesSeed grid 17 x 11, step 9, max 80 steps, min length 150.
Currents
154 linesSame field folded around 4 rotational gyres.
Migrations
18 routes14 stations, each linked to its 2 nearest.
Isolines
11 contours4 speculative landmasses, noise-perturbed nested rings.
Draw cascade
6 bucketsDiagonal wave, top-left to bottom-right, via data-d.

Inspiration, honestly noted

These informed the taste, not the pixels. Nothing here was traced, sampled, or copied; they are acknowledgements, not sources.

  • Flow-field cartography. The lineage of animated wind maps that render weather as streamlines rather than arrows: the idea that a moving line reads as a current.
  • The survey sheet. The restraint of engraved nautical charts: hairline graticules, a single accent for the shipping route, numbers set in a technical face.
  • Perlin and his descendants. Gradient and value noise as a way to grow organic direction from nothing, the quiet workhorse behind procedural terrain for decades.
  • Speculative atlases. The tradition of maps of invented places, drawn with the full seriousness of real ones, so the fiction is carried by the craft.

Provenance summary

For the record, and for anyone auditing the claim.

  • AI raster shippedNone
  • Vectors, proceduralGenerated at build, seed 73
  • Vectors, hand-authoredCompass glyph, cover globe, UI icons
  • TypeFraunces + Hanken Grotesk, self-hosted
  • Runtime JavaScript0 bytes