Ideas Factory/ the foundry

29 on the go · 3 materials
nothing here is finished

A hall after hours in the new look — a petrol-black ground, a condensed headline with a serif italic answering it, verdigris lot numbers, and the cars ruled off from one another rather than boxed.

← the floorif / 052·AI and software·live

Provenance

A museum for cars you do not own.

drawing052made oflit glassplates6drawn4 Jul 2026carsoffline

The screen

the card's own material, at page scale

> open ideas/052-provenance --line machine

Provenance

liveAI and software4 Jul 20266 updatesidea_052

The brief

live · rev G

A fantasy car museum. Museums hold halls, halls hold cars, and a car can be loaned to another hall as a guest without the record being copied — edit it anywhere and it changes everywhere, because there is only one of it.

The part that surprised me is how much of it turned out to be about place rather than data. A museum has a floor with a size in squares; halls are rooms standing on it, any shape you like, with doorways where they share a wall and a numbered route through them. A car is a bay inside a room wearing its own photograph. None of that is required — a museum you have never arranged draws itself — but a collection you can walk through is a different thing from a collection you can sort.

Everything lives in the browser. No account, no server, nothing to pay for, and the backup is a file you download. Sync across devices is off until you turn it on, and the app is complete without it.

There is a wanted list for cars you are chasing, running costs for what keeping one takes, and a deaccession that moves a sold car to the past collection with its whole history intact, because selling is not deleting.

It wears a new design as of September 2026. The first look was a gallery after dark — bevelled cards on a vignetted ground, one gold accent doing every job there was. This one is petrol-black rooms and bone ink, square corners, and rules instead of cards, with burnt orange reserved for money and verdigris for everything to do with finding your way. The pictures it used to carry are kept in the archive, because a redesign only reads next to the thing it replaced.

The plates

6 · lift any one out
A hall after hours in the new look — a petrol-black ground, a condensed headline with a serif italic answering it, verdigris lot numbers, and the cars ruled off from one another rather than boxed.
01 · A hall after hours in the new look — a petrol-black ground
The museum as a floor plan after hours — one dot per square, a room with a wall you could lean on, and the run of the floor stated across the top.
02 · The museum as a floor plan after hours — one dot per square
The same hall with the blinds open — the same rules and the same two accents inverted onto bone, rather than a second design.
03 · The same hall with the blinds open — the same rules and the same two accents inverted onto bone
The plan in daylight, each room tinted by how full it is.
04 · The plan in daylight
Archive — the hall as it was until 15 September 2026. Bevelled cards on a cream ground, gold drawing the borders and the figures alike.
05 · Archive — the hall as it was until 15 September 2026
Archive — the floor plan as it was until 15 September 2026. Every square of the floor drawn in the same line as the room standing on it.
06 · Archive — the floor plan as it was until 15 September 2026

The archive

1 · each has a page of its own

The log

6 updates

Redesigned. Petrol-black rooms, bone ink, square corners, and hairlines where there were bevelled cards. Two accents, one job each — burnt orange is money and nothing else, verdigris is everything to do with finding your way. Headlines in condensed industrial type with a serif italic answering each one, and daylight inverts the same rules rather than being a second design. The old look is kept in the archive.

A share arrives carrying the whole car and its photographs, not just the advert's heading.

The museum is drawn as a floor plan and the cars are parked on it. Halls can be any shape, and you can cut a door between two of them.

A listing link fills the form in. When the site refuses to be fetched — and the one it knows best usually does — the advert pasted in does the same job on the device.

Command palette, photo lightbox, undo on a deletion, and a daylight palette for people who do not want a dark gallery.

First version.