Independent pub

The problem

Is the kitchen open right now, and can I get a table — answered from a phone with one bar of signal in a car park, in the time it takes to glance at the screen. A golf club or an accountant can afford a considered read; a pub can't, which made this the smallest rebuild of the four and the one with the least patience for anything that isn't the answer.

What I did

• A masthead that states the day and the live kitchen/bar state the way a newspaper states its date — computed from the visitor's own clock, so "kitchen's on until nine" is only ever on screen when it's actually true, correctly across all five hours the state changes.
• Multi-column body text at desktop widths, drop caps on the two longest paragraphs, zero border radius anywhere — committing properly to the broadsheet language rather than a flat-colour layout with a newspaper typeface on it.
• One load-in sequence on the whole page — the masthead rule draws, the headline arrives, done — plus a marquee for the week's fixed points with a real pause button. No scroll-triggered animation anywhere else.
• The chalkboard specials and the beer garden photograph, both referenced in the copy for months before either actually existed on the page.

What it proves

The same standards as paid work: a performance budget it has to come in under, WCAG 2.2 AA as a floor rather than a finish, and no page that takes six seconds on a phone. Nobody briefed this and nobody signed it off, which is the honest limit of what a concept can show you.