CIPHER is a fictional museum of secret writing, art-directed as a declassified dossier: manila stock, typewriter headings, one rubber stamp, and wall text that must be decrypted, dialled, or de-redacted before it will talk.
Museums of cryptography tend to look like server rooms. This one looks like the filing cabinet the subject actually lived in. Every interaction is a period technique made honest: a working Caesar wheel, redaction bars that lift, a headline that arrives as ciphertext and resolves as you watch.
Special Elite — a worn typewriter face for headings and stamps; the voice of the file itself.
Cutive Mono — ciphertext and file numbers. Spectral carries the curator's prose.
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Decrypting headline | The hero text starts as Greek-and-dagger noise and resolves left to right on a 30ms clock — non-letters stay put so the sentence shape is legible before the words are. |
| Caesar wheel | Two SVG alphabet rings drawn programmatically, each glyph rotated on its own radius. The shift buttons redraw the inner ring and re-encode the sample sentence live — the wheel is the encoder, not an illustration of one. |
| Redaction bars | Ink-filled spans with transparent text; hover or keyboard focus lifts the bar. The joke in the dossier text is historically real — redaction-length attacks forced agencies to pad their bars. |
| Paper | An feTurbulence grain overlay and double-ruled stamp rotated 7° — the whole file styled from museum-archive conventions rather than "hacker" ones. |
| Accessibility | Reduced motion shows the headline in plaintext. Redactions are focusable with tabindex, so keyboard readers can lift every bar. The wheel's buttons are labelled. |
| You do | The page does |
|---|---|
| Arrive | The headline decrypts itself, once |
| Turn the wheel | The inner alphabet rotates and the sample sentence re-encodes at every stop |
| Hover a redaction | The bar lifts; the secret is a punchline |