Built from your four examples and your own instructions. Nothing here is live — it is a proposal to react to.
Where it stands
Round two. The archive is the product; the feed is the extra. A publisher can buy the archive alone and never want a feed — and for a newspaper or a company keeping a record, that is the whole purchase.
The archive leads. Asking the whole archive a question, reading any of it in another language, listening to any of it — visible, not behind a tab. These are the things a flipbook competitor cannot do.
An archive with no PDFs at all
A newspaper that only has OCR’d text, or a digital-only publisher. No scans, no page view, no feed — and it still has to read as a finished product rather than a trial waiting for something.
1,204 editions, no scans. Without a cover image the card is built from the edition’s own number, name and date — same grid, same square corners, never a broken-image icon. There is no Feed tab at all, because the Reader is switched off rather than half-available.
The publisher chooses the shape
Automatic by default. Every article starts on Auto and most are never touched. When a publisher does want to override it, they point at the shape rather than learn our names for things.
Six shapes, shown as pictures. And when an override cannot honestly be applied — a large-image layout on an article with no photograph — it falls back to the nearest honest shape and says why, rather than drawing an empty box.
Woven articles, and one address
An article written straight into the feed has no page behind it. The page tools are simply absent for that item while its neighbours keep theirs. An entire digital-only issue has no pages view at all.
Converted and woven, interleaved.The journey. Newest issue’s feed → its pages → the archive → a 2019 issue read as a feed.
One address per title. The feed is a lens over an issue, not a separate mode — so any issue from any year can be read either way.
What changed since you last looked
Archive first
The feed no longer takes the star billing. Ask, translate and listen across everything are prominent.
No PDFs
An archive with zero scans is designed properly, not treated as an edge case.
Studio control
Per-article layout override, auto by default, chosen by pointing at shapes.
Woven items
No page behind them; page tools absent rather than broken.
No picture
A designed placeholder, never an empty box and never nothing.
Wasted space
The dead area under the portrait lead is gone.
Still yours to settle
Round photographs of people
No bubbles — does that extend to headshots? Browsing an archive by writer is a strong feature we don’t offer today, and a circle is the convention for a face.
Charging
Not designed here, deliberately. The design keeps archive-only and archive-plus-reader sellable as separate things, so nothing forecloses how you price it.
