Three art directions, chosen from a dropdown

Editorial, Blueprint or Golden hour — each with its own set of framings rotated per post, so a run of new posts never reads as one photo shoot.

What it is

Three named directions. Editorial is trade-magazine photography with honest light and no colour grade, and carries seven framings from wide establishing shots to overhead tailgate arrangements. Blueprint is technical drafting — measured linework, ink blue and ochre — for posts where a photograph of a barn would be a lie. Golden hour is finished buildings at low sun. Which one is live is a setting, not a deploy, and the framing for a given post is chosen deterministically from its slug.

Also called: image style · art direction · blog image look · editorial blueprint golden hour

See it
Three art directions, chosen from a dropdown
Day rate
$500
Days figured
6
Crew size
3
Fuel & equipment
$300
Finished 2 days early — $1,600 back to the crew
The three style cards from the Autopilot tab with the active one outlined, each showing its blurb. Sample data — no customer information appears here.
How it works
  1. 1Each style carries a base look and a list of compositions.
  2. 2pick(seed, n) hashes the post slug to an index, so regenerating a post gives the same frame but neighbouring posts differ.
  3. 3Universal rules apply to every direction: immaculate workmanship in frame, no text, no logos, no interface, no letterbox bars, nothing that looks like a posed stock photo.
  4. 4The active style is autonomy.heroStyle, chosen from three cards in the Autopilot tab.
  5. 5An explicit style passed to the panel's generate action wins over the site default.
Why we built it

Quoted at the top of the block: "ART DIRECTION (Keith 08-24 — 'I'm currently not liking the style we have'). The previous single HOUSE_STYLE string was the whole problem. It pinned the camera, the light, the grade and the setting on EVERY hero — so every hero came back as the same photograph with a different barn in it, and a post about invoicing got a picture of framing lumber." Blueprint exists specifically so "a post about pricing gets a drawn diagram rather than a stock photo of a barn pretending to be about pricing." The workmanship rule survived from an earlier version "because a v5 frame died on visible missed nails."

The problem
  • A single fixed style produced visually identical heroes.
  • Abstract topics got literal photographs that misrepresented them.
  • Changing art direction required a code change.
Sound familiar?
What you get
The whole site's imagery changes from a dropdown
Neighbouring posts get different framings automatically
Regenerating a post gives the same frame, so the choice is repeatable

See it on your own jobs

Twenty minutes, your numbers, no slide deck. We’ll build one of your real buildings in front of you and send you the estimate link at the end — yours to keep either way.

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