01-fidelity.md

# 01 — Fidelity

**Open question.** Not *what goes on the page* — the brief settles that. Not *how it
behaves* — it is a landing page with a language toggle. The genuinely open question is
**what visual identity this project has**, and whether a page can argue for a design
process by being well designed rather than by describing itself.

**Chosen fidelity: production.**

**Why this one.** The deliverable is the shipped page. There is no downstream artifact
this feeds; `docs/index.html` on GitHub Pages *is* the outcome. Building a mockup first
and then rebuilding it as production would be pure duplication, because the mockup and
the production file are the same technology — one self-contained HTML file.

**Scope.** One page. One scroll. Two languages. Not a documentation site, not a multi-page
structure — the repository carries depth, the page carries the argument.

**Deliberately deferred.** Real install URLs (D4). A logo and favicon (none exists; the
page must work without one, which constrains the hero). Any documentation pages.

**Boundaries.** No server, no analytics, no form submission, no external data. The
language toggle is client-side only. Nothing on the page pretends to do something a
static file cannot.

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## Note on interpretation — flagged for v1.1

`choosing-fidelity.md` reads as though the chosen fidelity replaces the other artifacts:
pick wireframe *or* mockup *or* production. But the router runs Step 3 (wireframe) and
Step 4 (direction renders) regardless of what Step 2 chose, so on this run "production"
did not mean "skip to production".

The two are reconcilable — Step 2 chooses the **fidelity of the deliverable**, while
Steps 3 and 4 are **review instruments** that exist to de-risk it — but the reference
does not say so, and I had to decide that for myself mid-run. A single sentence in
`choosing-fidelity.md` would remove the ambiguity. Logged in the UAT report's
process-feedback section.

Interpretation used here: **fidelity = the deliverable's finish level. The wireframe and
the three directions are still produced, because structure precedes surface and the
direction is unsettled.**