V1 min
A stone a year
Lichen grows a millimetre or two a year; it keeps time, not events. The vita on the homepage works the same way: a stone for each year.
Lichen grows a millimetre or two a year. How thick it is on a gravestone tells you roughly how long the stone has stood there. It keeps time, not events.
The vita on the homepage follows the same idea. There is a stone for each year, with the year carved on it, and the older the stone, the thicker the lichen and the harder the letters are to read. The latest things are the clearest, and the further back you go the fainter they get, a little like memory. Move the crystal over a stone and you see it clean underneath.
The lichen grows in a shader. Layers of noise decide where it covers; inside that area it is scattered with stippled grains and patches, thinner in the carved letters. How much of each stone it covers depends on the stone’s year. The letters come from a white-on-black image, and the shader uses its gradient to work out how light from the upper left falls into the cuts, so the letters are carved in, not printed on.
The camera starts at the stone for Now and walks back a year at a time, through the arch in each stone. Four stones stand on the path today: Now, 2026, 2025 and 2023.