Greta, 22 September 2026. Both drawn fresh on Grok, headless, on Scott's own subscription. Nothing reused, nothing cropped out of another job, no paid API call.
Scott, about 17:3x BST, verbatim: "throw the whole lot out and start again with bespoke grok art work and an email from scott@salus", and a minute later: "forget the look of the website", and "this is a peronal email not a business transaction".
My standing law 37 says a picture carrying the brand is composed to the brand artefacts he has already chosen, and law 5 says his own starred picks come first. His sentence above overrides both for this one piece, and that is recorded here rather than assumed. So the site's midnight navy, its lavender glow and its teal appear nowhere in these two pictures. Neither does the brand name: there is no lettering of any kind in either image, so law 37's brand-source block does not apply and the composer that enforces it was not used. The laws themselves are unchanged.
The artefacts I would otherwise have read, named so the gap is visible rather than silent: the
app's own home hero (MASTERdrive/App/src/components/TabLayout.tsx), the mark
(MASTERdrive/App/public/images/salus-icon-80.png), the site stylesheet
(MASTERdrive/Website/css/style.css). None was opened for these two pictures, on his word.
Two candidates per slot, each read as a picture before it was judged, never as a filename.
| slot | file | pixels | kept | why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1, the room at the end of the day | header.jpg |
1200 x 675 | header-b |
Everything the brief named is in it: the bed edge low and left, the curtain half drawn, a far scattering of town lights over low hills beyond the glass, one small warm lamp as the only made light. It reads as somebody's room, not a showroom. |
| 2, the night given back | scene-rest.jpg |
1200 x 675 | rest-b |
The lamp is genuinely out, the phone lies face down with its screen hidden, the covers are settled, and the light is the real first grey of dawn through a half-drawn curtain. Warmer and softer than slot 1, so the two read in order. |
Rejected, kept in rejected/ so the choice can be checked:
header-a-rejected.jpg, a good quiet room, but no town lights, no curtain and a plainer wall,
so it answers less of the brief than the one kept. It was also drawn against my own slot list
before Elsie's brief landed.rest-a-rejected.jpg, the lamp is still lit, and the brief's whole point for this slot is
that the lamp is out. The room also reads like a hotel rather than somebody's own.The brief asks for the header at 1200 x 600, which is 2:1. Grok will not draw 2:1 on this route. An exact 1200 x 600 blank canvas was uploaded and Grok returned 1792 x 1008, which is 16:9; it clamps to the nearest shape its own composer offers. The only way to reach 2:1 from that is a crop, and cropping a finished picture is banned outright (standing law 19). So the header is delivered at 1200 x 675, the true shape it was drawn in. Elsie's header box changes from 600 x 300 to 600 x 338, which is one number in the email shell.
Both files are a same-ratio Lanczos reduction of Grok's own 1792 x 1008 output to 1200 x 675 (1.7778 in, 1.7778 out). No crop, no stretch, no letterbox, no upscale.
Elsie asked for these so the email's own furniture can be set from the pictures rather than from a palette decided before they existed. Read by reducing each picture to six colours and counting:
header.jpg, a warm brown #413025 (37 per cent), a near-black #211d20 (21), and a cool
blue-grey #4c474c (21) which is the window. Warm room, cold night, nothing else.scene-rest.jpg, a soft mid brown #64584c (28 per cent), a deep warm brown #24190f (27),
and #3a332c (21). No blue in the top four: the dawn reads as warm grey, not cold.A sensible letter ground from these is a warm off-white with a warm brown rule, not a grey one.
No lettering, wordmark, logo, badge, numeral, clock face, signage or book title in either picture. No app screen and no user interface; the phone in slot 2 is face down with a dark back. No people, no faces, no hands. Nobody on an edge, a ledge, a rooftop or a cliff, and no figure in or near deep water (Scott's hard stop of 26 April 2026). No clutter: slot 1 holds a lamp, a small plant and a framed print, slot 2 a lamp and a phone, and nothing else. One hand across both: the same soft photographic render, the same light level, the same depth of field. Slot 2 was drawn with slot 1's own output attached as the style reference, which is how the two were held together.
header.jpg (header-b): "Repaint this blank canvas entirely, keeping its exact size and aspect.
A real bedroom at the end of the day, seen from inside. The edge of a bed with soft rumpled covers
fills the lower left of the frame. A window on the right has its curtain half drawn, and beyond it
lies a quiet night over low hills with a far scattering of small town lights. One small warm lamp on
a bedside table is the only made light in the room. Lived in, not a showroom. Deep blue night, warm
brown and amber indoors, soft even light with no heavy vignette. Calm, uncluttered, cinematic
photograph. No text, no words, no letters, no logo, no people, no screens."
scene-rest.jpg (rest-b): "Repaint this blank canvas entirely in the same hand, light and level
of detail as the attached room photograph, keeping the canvas size and aspect. The same bedroom at
first light. The bedside lamp is switched off. Soft cool dawn light comes through a half drawn
curtain and lies across settled bed covers and a warm wooden floor. A phone rests face down beside
the lamp with its screen hidden. Warm and gentle, low contrast, no strong shadow. Cream, warm brown
and soft grey blue. Quiet, uncluttered, cinematic photograph. No text, no words, no letters, no
logo, no people, no lit screen."
My own lesson of this morning says read the gauge before any submit and stop at 97 per cent, because at 97 a press registers nothing and spends nothing.
Five submits in total, one per picture, none repeated. Four returned art: header-a, header-b,
rest-a, rest-b. One earlier batch of eight rows was started against my own slot list before Elsie's
brief arrived and was stopped after its first draw the moment the brief cut the job to two
pictures, so seven wrong draws were never spent. The one draw it did spend is header-a, which is
kept in rejected/ rather than thrown away.
header.jpg and scene-rest.jpg are the two finished pictures. rejected/ holds the two that lost.
work/ holds the plans, both runners and both run logs (run-log.txt and run2-log.txt), so any claim here can be checked against what
actually happened. Grok's raw output stays on disk beside them and is not committed.
Nothing is uploaded, served or sent. Scott sees these rendered in the email before anything moves (standing law 37(d)).