Cadmus, who brought the letters
The alphabet arrives from somewhere else and settles into the words you already know.
Every character cycles through the Greek alphabet and settles into the letter it was always going to be, staggered along the line. The glyphs are held long enough to be read as Greek rather than blurred — a blur is the same effect in any alphabet, and this one is meant to be recognised. `archaic` adds the four letters Greek itself dropped: digamma, koppa, stigma and sampi, which is what makes a line look old rather than mathematical. Each cell is pinned to the width of its settled character before anything runs, so the headline never shivers.
Integration
<link rel="stylesheet" href="anthemion.css">
<script type="module" src="anthemion.js"></script>
<anthemion-kadmos forms="capitals" cycles="14" rate="58" stagger="38" order="reading" seed="1">
Quarry House
</anthemion-kadmos>Slot
A masthead, a section title, or the opening line of a statement.
Budget
- Headings only. Never on body copy — a paragraph that passes through an unreadable phase is a paragraph nobody finishes.
- Two per page at the very most, and never two in one viewport. It is a arrival, and everything arriving at once is a slot machine.
- It needs a real text node as its child. Given an element it has nothing to read and renders nothing.
- Do not drop `rate` below about 35ms. Faster than that the glyphs stop being legible as Greek and it becomes an ordinary blur, which is the one thing this must not be.
- Keep it off anything a reader needs immediately — a price, an error, a deadline. The settled text is correct within about a second and a half, and that is a second and a half of nonsense.
Restraint is the aesthetic, and it does not survive being applied generously. These limits are the specification, not advice.