Finished work hides its own making, so this room keeps the paper trail: the versions, the notes, the dead ends the projects room politely leaves out.
scrap 01
The audit that killed my favorite idea
From the red-team review of this portfolio's concepts, kept verbatim because it stung and was correct:
“Solved a problem the user may not have. Zero evidence these concepts work in hiring. The scoring matrix was fabricated.”
I had scored my own ideas numerically to make the ranking feel objective. The audit noticed the scores had no methodology. It was right. The numbers were confidence wearing a costume.
verso · in pencil, march 2026
I was angry for exactly one day. Then I taped it above my desk, where it has been correct every day since.
scrap 02
The overcorrection
Midway through this project I swung from “elaborate fictional archive” all the way to “a person figuring out what they want to be,” and caught myself in a message I still have: “it's like we came back to the cliché we disregarded first.” The swing is the lesson. The opposite of a mistake is usually a different mistake.
verso · april 2026
What the front doesn't say: the banal version felt safe, and the safety was the whole temptation.
scrap 03
A sketch, a screenshot, a note to self
This entry wants images: the napkin sketch, the messy Downloads folder screenshot, the first ugly draft of the door page. Optimize through Squoosh (WebP, ≤80 KB each), drop them in /img, and describe each in one honest sentence.
placeholder page-note: scraps 01–02 are real, quoted from this project's actual history. Scrap 03 is the ＊ slot for visual artifacts. The room works without images but is better with three.