The same small app on each candidate floor. The ladder marks where the floor sits: what is left above it is the room for cards and raised tiers, what is left below is the room for wells, columns and selected rows. Read each frame's legend: card contrast against the floor, whether the well actually sinks (↓) or is forced up (↑), and where a ghost row's hover and current fills land (they only fail when they read =).

A store back office: sidebar chrome merged into the floor, KPI cards and an orders card above it. Switch floors. On peak the cards only exist through their muted border. Hover the sidebar nav and watch the current row. Navigation's rows are transparent, so their states step off the floor (the frame publishes it with data-surface-floor). On base, hover lifts to peak and the current row sinks to ground (1.05:1 each, in opposite directions). On peak they sink to base / valley as before; on ground there is no room below, so both rise. Before the fix every floor got peak's steps: on base, hover painted the floor itself (1.00:1).

floor = basecard…well…hover…current…

peakbaseground

Orders

Last 30 days · all channels

Export New order

Revenue$48,210+12.4%

Orders1,284+3.1%

Refunds38+9

Avg. basket$37.55−0.8%

Latest orders

5 of 1,284

#4821Ana Prado$318.00

#4820Kenji Mori$92.40

#4819Lola Brandt$1,204.00

#4818Omar Haddad$57.10

#4817Sofia Reis$212.75

Fulfilment

Today

Picked

82%

Packed

64%

Shipped

41%

Columns are wells cut into the floor and the task cards sit on top of them (interactive: hover them). This is the case that needs room BELOW the floor. Columns go two steps down: on base they sink to ground and the cards rise to peak — three distinct levels. On ground nothing is lower, so the column is forced up to valley (↑): it reads as a raised tray, and the cards on it are only a tint apart from it. On peak the column sinks to base but the cards are back on the floor's colour. (One step down was tried first: valley on base is 1.02:1 and vanishes in dark mode.)

floor = basecard…well…hover…current…

peakbaseground

Sprint 42

Task

Backlog3

Audit the onboarding emails

Growth

Draft the pricing FAQ

Docs

Spike: offline mode for the POS

R&D

In progress2

Rebuild the invoice PDF template

Billing

Rotate the staging keys

Security

Done1

Ship SSO for the enterprise tier

Auth

A form-heavy page: a filter input and the page heading straight on the floor, then cards of fields. Inputs keep their own default fill in every take. Watch the filter input on the floor (does it read as a field without a card around it?) and the fields inside the cards (identical in every take — they only ever see peak).

Reading straight on the floor: a help-centre article with a code block cut into the page and a tip callout. There are no cards to separate, so the floor IS the reading surface. Compare body-text comfort and how the code well and the callout hold up on each floor. This is the app type that argues for peak, but the rule is a peak SHEET on a base page (as these docs now do), not a peak page.

POST /v2/orders/4821/refunds
{
  "amount": 4500,
  "reason": "damaged_item",
  "notify_customer": true
}

The message list sits straight on the floor as interactive transparent Panels, the first one active; the open thread is a peak card. Hover the rows and compare the active row on each floor. The rows step off the floor: on base, hover rises to peak and the active row sinks to ground; inside the peak thread card the same Panel would sink to base / valley. Before the fix they always used peak's steps, and hover vanished on base.

floor = basecard…well…hover…current…

peakbaseground

Inbox 2 new

Marta SilvaQ4 vendor contractsAttached the redlines from legal. Two clauses need…09:42Diego AlvesRe: staging outageRoot cause was the cron overlap. Patch is in review.08:15Hana SatoDesign review movedThursday 3pm works better for the team, if that…YesterdayPriya NairInvoice #2291Paid in full — thanks for the quick turnaround.Mon

Q4 vendor contracts

Marta Silva · 09:42

Hi team — attached are the redlines from legal on the three vendor renewals. Two clauses need a decision before Friday: the auto-renewal window on the logistics contract and the liability cap on the payments one.

vendor-redlines-q4.pdf2.4 MB

Send

Elevation comes from the shadow, so a menu or dialog is peak + shadow on every floor. Left: an open menu over the page. Right of it: a dialog over a ground-tinted scrim. The higher the floor, the more the menu depends on its shadow alone; check whether peak-on-peak still reads as a layer.

The same three floors pinned to light (top) and dark (bottom), whatever the page is in. In dark mode down the ramp is still darker (ground = shade 50), so the floor/card relation is the same shape: check that the readouts agree in both modes and that cards on a base floor don't go muddy in dark.