21 / 25·Motion & Interaction
CIPHER
Cryptography museum. A working cipher wheel in a paper archive.
About the work
A museum of secret writing built like a declassified dossier: a Caesar wheel with programmatically set ring glyphs encodes your text live at any shift, and redacted passages lift their bars when you commit to reading them.
How it was made
The wheel had to be honest — its output is computed from the rotation, so the museum's central exhibit is verifiable. Iteration went to the redactions: the lift needed to feel like a decision, not a hover accident.
Like every work in the exhibition, it passed three full iteration passes — a visual critique, a deepening pass, and a QA pass at 390px with reduced motion and zero console errors — and documents itself in its own build guide.
Key features
- Working Caesar wheel — live encoding at every shift
- Ring glyphs laid out programmatically, not as an image
- Hover-lift redaction bars over the classified passages
- Typewriter-and-stamp typography of the case file
Technology
- SVG
- Live text transforms
- CSS interactions
In its own light
