About Interfacing

interface phenomena laboratory — web edition v0.6

A line is a dot that went for a walk. — Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 1925 (after, more or less)

I. What this is

A laboratory for interface design phenomena. Thirty-nine principles you can violate in real time, thirty-one deviations the renato.design suite commits on purpose, seventeen dark patterns catalogued (fifteen plus two research-documented anti-patterns), ninety-four concordance entries, a hundred and forty-two help cards. The native app is the instrument. This is the reading room.

II. Why the web edition

Because the argument travels. The native Mac app has FidgetUI, the GhostPerformer walkthrough, Nerd Mode, a Konami code we will not spoil. The web edition has the ported content, the interactive labs, and no install. Both are the same book with different bindings.

III. Ground rules

No build step, no framework, no CDN. Plain HTML, plain CSS, vanilla JavaScript. System fonts. Dark mode only because a lab about contrast cannot also be a lab about theme switching. No analytics. No cookies. Nothing watches you read.

IV. Voice

Every principle carries a primary citation in the author’s own name. Where the wording could not be verified against a primary source, the line has been paraphrased or removed. Nothing here is fabricated. Nothing is borrowed without transformation. The scholarship is real; the writing is new.

V. Credits

Phil Renato — design, voice, editorial authority.
Claude — code, architecture, the boring parts and some of the interesting ones. The collaboration method is called ILCA: Iterative LLM Co-Authorship.

VI. Fair use, originality, and one inherited fragment

Experimental · no warranty · use at your own risk

Interfacing is an experimental research artifact, not production software. It is not tested, certified, or supported for professional, commercial, safety-critical, or regulated work. Readings may look plausible and be wrong. Demos may misfire. By using Interfacing you accept that you are responsible for what you do with it and its output.

Nothing leaves your browser. The web edition runs entirely client-side — no analytics, no cookies, no server round-trips. Screenshots, folders, or specs you drop into the Critique wing are inspected locally and discarded when you close the tab.

Interfacing is free — free to download, free to play, free to inspect. Nearly all the code is original, authored through ILCA between Phil and Claude. The exception: the Fitts ambient-mode DOM scanner inside Lab 01 was ported from a prior Gemini-assisted sketch (gooey-app/src/components/FittsHeatmap.tsx) in Phil’s own workspace; the math was verified against Fitts (1954) and the React shell was stripped. That provenance is documented in the native tree’s NOTICES.md. An earlier Pack IV attempt to port three physics labs from Gemini’s Forma workspace was cut on thesis grounds before shipping anywhere publicly.

All visual references are labelled. No design system is mimicked pixel-for-pixel. Trademarks (Apple HIG, Nielsen Norman Group, Figma, Adobe, WCAG, GDPR, EU DSA, FTC, and every company or product named in the Dark Patterns wing as an example) belong to their respective owners; naming them here is nominative fair use for pedagogical context only. The principles being taught — Fitts, Hick, Miller, Gestalt, Brignull’s dark-pattern taxonomy — live in the scholarly record and are cited with author and year; nobody owns Fitts’s law.

Research software, not commercial software. Not an accessibility compliance tool, not a legal opinion on dark patterns, not an endorsement by any cited person or institution. If you are cited and would rather not be, Phil will remove the reference on request — write to philrenatoatgmail.

VII. Where to go next

Pick a lab from the index. Or read the Deviations wing — the other half of the book. Or drop a screenshot into the Critique wing and watch five pixel-level lenses read your work back to you. Or open the Concordance for the citations and rationale. Or the Help for every knob explained.