CONSTRUCT

The identity and boot animation of CONSTRUCT, a Linux desktop for developers built on Wolfi: a read-only, verified base image with A/B updates and automatic rollback, and GNOME on top.

See the desktop with the palette - preview.html, published by GitHub Pages from main (dark, light).

The idea: the image does not move; the workspace does. The open room has two layers with fixed roles:

• The outline (the logo's mark) is the stable base. It is drawn early, in a single gesture from the corner (each line leaves from one already drawn; the edges hang from the top one), and from frame 7 it stays fixed, at full intensity, to the end.
• The inner grid is the workspace: finer and dimmer, it is built inside the outline, comes alive, breathes while the system waits, and goes out at the end. It never touches or changes the outline.

The sequence (48 frames, 1080×1080; the preview video lasts 5 s at 9.6 fps) has three parts:

Part	Frames	What happens
intro	1–26	the outline (closed at 7), CONSTRUCT (complete at 10), the grid drawn and lit
wait	27–38	the grid breathes, evenly and without direction; it repeats seamlessly for as long as needed
outro	39–48	the grid goes out; the mark and the word remain: the logo

Nothing is tied to the boot's real state, so nothing pretends to show progress or verification: the intro is choreography of fixed length and the wait goes nowhere. If the boot ends during the intro, the brand is already recognizable from the first second. The tagline is not on the splash.

The tagline is set in lowercase, on two lines:

the workspace.
the image, verified.

First the space you work in, then the verified base that holds it up. It is used in the distribution's presentation and identity pieces.

Requirements

Task and Docker. Every generator runs in the image the Dockerfile describes - Python 3.13 by digest, pinned numpy, opencv-python-headless and pillow (requirements.txt), and pngquant from a dated Debian snapshot - so the same sources make the same images on any machine. task image builds it; every task that needs it builds it first.

Usage

Command	What it does
task / task all	Everything: frames, video, sprite, compressed Plymouth frames, logo, palette and wallpapers
task generate	Renders frames/construct_01.png … construct_48.png
task encode	Builds construct.mp4 (5 s) from the frames
task play	Opens construct.mp4 in this machine's video player
task sprite	Builds sprite.png: an 8×6 grid of the 48 numbered frames
task plymouth	Transparent PNGs for Plymouth in plymouth/, each picture once and compressed with pngquant, and the order they play in
task logo	The logo in logos/: SVG in color, GNOME symbolic and Orchis' Activities button, PNG from 16 to 64 px, and the installer's app tile
task palette	Checks palette.toml's contrast, edges and perceptual separation (CIEDE2000 under colour-vision deficiencies, IPS and dimmed panels) and writes it into palette/: for the theme forks, the image, Ghostty, VS Code and the preview (THEMING.md)
task wallpaper	The desktop backgrounds - default, quiet, offset and mark, each dark and light - at 2880×1800 (16:10), and construct.xml, which offers them in Settings, into wallpapers/; fails unless each variant is calmer than the default
task preview	Opens preview.html: the desktop with the palette, in dark and light; GitHub Pages publishes it from main
task compress	Runs pngquant over plymouth/*.png again, replacing the files
task lint	Fails if a fork checked out beside brand (FORKS=..) writes a color palette.toml does not, draws the accent at an alpha that is not a token, rounds, spaces or shadows off THEMING.md's shape and elevation tables, or holds a stale copy of the palette (lint-forks.toml)
task check	Fails if the committed plymouth/, logos/, wallpapers/ and palette/ are not what the sources make
task clean	Removes frames/, construct.mp4 and sprite.png

plymouth/, logos/, wallpapers/ and palette/ are committed - they are what the distribution takes - and task check holds them to the sources: it regenerates them and compares each image over black, within a tolerance per directory (OpenCV picks its vector code by processor; pngquant's palette follows the pixels, so the Plymouth frames get more), every other file byte for byte, and fails on a file only one side has. After changing video.py, room.py, plymouth.py, logo.py, wallpaper.py, palette.toml or the font, run task plymouth logo palette wallpaper and commit the result. The video and the sprite are previews, not committed.

Each task runs the ones it needs first (play → encode → generate → image) and skips the ones that are up to date.

Variables that can be changed:

task encode DURATION=8                   # same number of frames, slower
task generate FRAMES_DIR=out
task sprite COLS=12                      # a 12-column grid
task plymouth SIZE=800                   # Plymouth frames at 800 px
task plymouth QUALITY=65-85              # more aggressive pngquant

Scripts

• video.py [dir] [frame ...]: renders every frame, or only the indexes given (from 0), e.g. python video.py out 0 47.
• encode.py [dir] [out.mp4] [seconds]: joins the PNGs into an mp4 with fps = frames / seconds.
• plymouth.py [dir] [out]: turns the frames into transparent RGBA PNGs, each picture once, and writes sequence.json; task plymouth compresses the PNGs with pngquant.
• sprite.py [dir] [out.png] [columns] [px]: puts every frame into one image (8 columns and 270 px thumbnails by default).
• logo.py [out_dir]: the logo files.
• palette.py [out_dir]: checks the palette's contrast, edges and perceptual separation and writes it out (CSS, SCSS, JSON, Ghostty, VS Code, the preview's perception table and simulation filters); palette.load() is what the other generators read the colors from.
• wallpaper.py [out_dir] [width] [height]: the desktop backgrounds - the default, the boot's drawing, and its quiet, offset and mark variants, each dark and light - and their gnome-background-properties entries; it fails unless every variant is calmer than the default.
• room.py: the room, its camera and its lines, which video.py, wallpaper.py and logo.py all draw.
• check.py <committed_dir> <regenerated_dir>: compares a committed directory with a regenerated one.
• lint.py <forks_dir>: the forks' colors, and Orchis' radii, spacing and shadows, against the palette and THEMING.md's tables, and their copies of the palette (lint-forks.toml).

Plymouth

task plymouth writes each picture of the animation once, as frame-NNNN.png (numbered from 1 in order of first appearance: 39 pictures for the 48 frames shown, since the loop breathes out through the pictures it breathed in by and the outro ends on the logo the intro reached at frame 11), and sequence.json, the frame numbers each part plays:

{
 "intro": [1, 2, ..., 26],
 "loop": [27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28],
 "outro": [27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 11, 11, 11],
 "mark_center": 0.4329
}

• intro: played once at the start.
• loop: repeated while the system boots; its last frame joins its first.
• outro: played once at the end; its last frame is the logo. Plymouth hands the screen to the login screen as soon as the boot is done, so the distribution plays the outro when the disk asks for its password, with the prompt under the logo.
• If the boot ends before the intro does, the cleanest thing is to show the outro's last frame (the logo) directly instead of jumping into the middle of the sequence.
• mark_center: the mark's vertical centre as a fraction of the frame's height, without the wordmark under it, so the theme can put the mark where the wallpaper draws it.

Format:

• One PNG per picture, with no numbers or borders, on a transparent background: Plymouth puts the black behind it.
• Drawn at their final size (SIZE, 1080 by default; 800 at least) rather than scaled.
• Made as lossless RGBA (~5.8 MB) and compressed in place by pngquant (--quality 80-95, variable QUALITY): ~1.3 MB for the 39 pictures at 1080 px (~33 KiB each; the grid is in almost all of them). They go into the boot's initrd, which the firmware reads from the disk before anything else, so every kilobyte is in the boot time.

Font

The word uses Audiowide, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: it may be used, embedded in images and redistributed with the distribution. The file is in the repository (fonts/Audiowide-Regular.ttf, license in LICENSES/OFL-1.1.txt), so nothing needs installing and it comes out the same on any machine. "Audiowide" is a Reserved Font Name: the file is used as it is; if the font is ever modified, it must be renamed. The same font and spacing are used in the animation and the logo; in both the word is as wide as the edge of the floor above it.

To try another font:

FONT=/path/Font.ttf task generate

The path must be inside the repository: the generators run in a container that only sees it.

The desktop's own text is GNOME's: Adwaita Sans for the interface, in its regular weight, and Adwaita Mono where apps show code; the terminal alone uses JetBrains Mono, Ghostty's default. palette.toml's type names them. preview.html draws with the same faces: Adwaita Sans and Mono from fonts/ (GNOME's adwaita-fonts 51.0, LICENSES/OFL-1.1-Adwaita.txt), JetBrains Mono from Google Fonts.

License

• The artwork - the logo (logos/), the animation's frames (plymouth/ and what task generates), the wallpapers (wallpapers/), the palette and the tagline - is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (LICENSES/CC-BY-SA-4.0.txt).
• The scripts, preview.html, the Taskfile.yml and the Dockerfile are under the MIT license (LICENSES/MIT.txt).
• The Audiowide font is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (LICENSES/OFL-1.1.txt); Adwaita Sans and Adwaita Mono too, with their authors' notice (LICENSES/OFL-1.1-Adwaita.txt).