splash

Use at the top of Splash production, per beat and before any craft skill — reads the closed STORYBOARD slot, the frozen profile, and the frozen data, and writes the chart-ready beats/<id>/data.json plus DATA-NOTES.md. Refuses, writing nothing, when Gate 2 is unclosed for the slot or the frozen sources are missing or no longer agree.

Use to produce a chart beat — one visual with one thing to prove — by WRITING a bespoke component under doctrine, then rendering a still and looking at it. Carries the seed that teaches the anatomy (pure geometry, furniture derived from the ground, direct annotation, one accent), the static discipline, and the render ladder's first rung. SP1 covers the static format only.

Use to produce a chart beat in the VIDEO format — a directed motion piece (title card, an argument told in shots, the whole chart at the end) written under the owner's choreography rules and one editable timing contract, measured in Bun and verified by looking at rendered frames before the mp4. Carries the directed-video path (rules, 32 type sheets, the shared shot helpers), the timing contract, the seed composition, and the render ladder's second rung.

Use to produce a chart beat in the WEB format — a self-contained interactive HTML page that fills its container edge to edge (geometry stretches continuously, type stays a fixed CSS size), adds hover/tap/keyboard detail on every reading the static frame had to omit, and degrades to that same static frame with JavaScript off. Carries the interaction script, one worked composition, and the render ladder's third rung.

Use to run the DELIVERY phase of the doctrine twin — offer the journalist the forms their beat's format allows, wait for the choice, and materialise only that one. Never builds a form nobody asked for.

The reference documents every twin production skill reads before writing a line of rendering code — the editorial standard, information architecture, the visual system, the named anti-patterns, and a verified reference set. Never invoked alone; there is no gate, no state, no script a journalist runs directly.

Use to produce a Datawrapper chart beat after the journalist chooses Datawrapper for an eligible storyboard treatment — map the editorial contract onto the Datawrapper v3 API, persist the provider chart ID, and take back an owned PNG or published web artifact. Rendering is delegated; this skill holds no geometry or seed component.

Use to produce an image beat — a beat whose evidence is a photograph, not a drawing — by WRITING a bespoke component under doctrine, then rendering a still and looking at it. Carries the seed that teaches the anatomy (the journalist's own photos, one consistent letterboxed box, the journalist's own words), the image discipline (required alt and credit, letterbox not crop or stretch, EXIF orientation detected not corrected, a weight ceiling), and the render ladder's first rung for this medium. SP1 covers the static format only.

Use when a journalist wants to see what newsrooms have already published on a subject — before a story exists, during one, or with no intention of producing anything — by searching the Splash inspiration gallery once and showing the raw list (title, newsroom, date, link) with the searches left today. Needs no story directory, opens no gate, produces nothing.

Use to freeze a journalist's article and data into a story's source/ folder and silently profile the data — the INTAKE phase of the doctrine twin, asking nothing and never revisited.

Use to produce a MAP beat — one map with one thing to prove — in either format, static or video, by WRITING a bespoke component under doctrine and looking at the render. Carries the bake for a still (one camera, one basemap plate, one file of projected geometry), the live MapTiler map path for a video (a plan driven per frame, measured once, rendered through a keyless proxy), the join that fails loud, the class scale that makes a comparison legible, and one worked beat per map type.

Use to produce a map beat in the WEB format — a self-contained interactive HTML page that fits the reader's window, where hovering or focusing a region gives its exact value, a size legend stays readable, and an opt-in accessible table can carry the same facts for a reader with no spatial access to the map. Fills the missing cell in this toolchain's matrix — charts ship static/web/video, maps shipped only static/video until this skill.

Use to derive a proposed newsroom charter — brand colour, further accents, ground, typefaces — by measuring the newsroom's own website, when the journalist doesn't have a NEWSROOM.md yet and doesn't know their house colours off the top of their head. Every value ships with where it was read, and every accent ships with what it MEASURES against the ground, so a pair a reader could not see fails here rather than at the render. Nothing is written until the journalist confirms it.

Use to decide the colours a beat is drawn in — the ground, the accent that carries the argument, and the further house accents a multi-series beat needs. Proposes the subject's own convention first when the subject carries one a reader already holds, the newsroom's house colours second, and says out loud when no convention applies; measures every accent against the WCAG non-text floor and REFUSES one a reader cannot see, at the proposal and again when the answer is read back; records the journalist's answer in PALETTE.md. Every craft skill's own seed reads that file and refuses rather than default; a beat that reads it refuses rather than default.

Use to run the doctrine twin end to end — recover a story's phase from its own directory, refuse any jump ahead of it, close each gate into a file, and dispatch to the one craft skill a beat actually needs. Never produces a visual itself; that is always the craft skill's job.

Use to run the STORYBOARD phase of the doctrine twin — the editorial exchange, platform-neutral treatment selection, and conditional custom-or-Datawrapper choice that close Gate 2 by writing STORYBOARD.md, never by conversation alone.