Containment Brutalism

Containment Instrument Brutalism

Emotional target: billion-dollar research lab reactor display. Material rule: crude but expensive.

This is not a style guide. It's a constraint field. Every pixel must look like it was machined for a facility where the equipment costs more than the building.

Identity

TRENCH is a containment instrument. The UI is the faceplate of a reactor monitoring station — not a consumer product, not a DAW plugin, not a website. It exists because someone with clearance needs to see what's happening inside the cascade.

The aesthetic is the intersection of:

• Industrial sensor displays (thick bezels, recessed indicators, zero decoration)
• Nuclear/particle physics control rooms (status-first, density over beauty)
• Military flight instruments (information survives at a glance under stress)

Hard Rules

1. No anti-aliasing on traces. Aliased 1px lines only. Smooth curves look consumer-grade.
2. No gradients, no drop shadows, no glow. Light doesn't diffuse on instrument glass.
3. No rounded corners. Containment vessels have seams, not curves.
4. Monospace only. Share Tech Mono. Precision readouts to 6 decimal places where applicable.
5. Palette is material, not decorative:
   • Background: #0A0A0A (instrument cavity black)
   • Primary trace: #00FFCC (reactor coolant cyan)
   • Warning trace: #FF4500 (thermal orange)
   • Inactive/label: #3A3A3A (machined graphite)
   • Bezel highlight: #1A1A1A (milled edge catch)
6. Bezels are structural. 2px hard inset (not decorative border). They look like the display is recessed into a metal panel.
7. Information density over whitespace. Every square pixel earns its place. Dead space is a design failure.
8. No hover states, no transitions, no animations unless they represent a real-time measurement changing.
9. Labels are terse. "FREQ" not "Frequency". "Q" not "Resonance". Stenciled, not typeset.

When Using Scientific Skills for Visualization

Strictly output raw vertex data for wgpu or aliased 1px Canvas lines. No anti-aliased SVG. No matplotlib. No d3.js. No high-level plotting libraries unless explicitly requested. The math is rigorous; the rendering is crude.

When Writing wgpu Pipelines

• Disable MSAA. sample_count: 1.
• SDF-based recessed bezels (2px hard inset).
• Interlace flicker on 2D traces (1px scanline at 50% opacity, alternating rows).
• Vertex colors, not texture maps. The display is self-illuminated, not lit.

Decision Test

"Does this look like it belongs on a $200M reactor console, or a $5/month SaaS dashboard?"

If dashboard — delete it and start over.