Japanese Ma Minimal

About this style

Ma (間) is the Japanese idea of the interval: the space between things, valued as part of the composition rather than as empty background. Paired with sumi ink brushwork, washi paper and the red seal (hanko) that has long served as a signature on calligraphy and documents, it produces images where restraint and one confident gesture carry the meaning. Brands use it to convey calm, craft and quiet confidence.

Make a 10-second Japanese minimalist piece built on ma, the beauty of empty space.

<inputs>
Brand: KUMO. Tagline: "Steeped in quiet." Three words: still, slow, clear. Seal character: 雲 (one or two kanji, also used as the vertical accent). Duration: 10s. If I don't give you something, use the default and don't ask.
</inputs>

<direction>
Palette: washi #F1EBDF, sumi #1C1A17 (density varying 70–100% within a stroke), pale ink wash #8B857A at 8–15% opacity, seal vermilion #B8312F.
Type: Shippori Mincho, 800 for kanji, 400 for Latin. Latin stays small (26–30px, tracked 0.3em), never larger than the seal. Kanji may run vertically.
Composition: at least 70% of the frame stays empty paper. The hero is one brush gesture, an open ensō 520px across, centered at 60% x, 45% y. Text sits to one side on a quiet vertical axis, the seal at its foot. Nothing touches the edges.
Texture: generate washi once at load, seeded, into an offscreen canvas: soft tonal mottling plus a few hundred long, faint fibers. Precomputing static geometry is fine; each frame redraws from t.
Brush: stamp overlapping ellipses along the path with a pressure curve: a heavy entry with a slight ink pool, thinning midway, then kasure (dry brush) where seeded gaps split it into bristle streaks. Progress follows cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1) over 2.2s. The seal is a 64px red square with the character reversed out, edges slightly ragged, ink faintly uneven.
Motion is restraint: one thing moves at a time, with long stillness between. Fades take 1–1.6s on cubic-bezier(0.33, 0, 0.15, 1); text emerges with a 6px blur-to-sharp ink bleed. Real ma treats the empty interval as content; the cheap version is cherry blossoms and a brush font.
Banned: cherry blossoms, koi, torii, bamboo, red suns, brush fonts for Latin, centered symmetry, shadows, fast or bouncy motion, a second red element.
</direction>

<structure>
0.0–1.0s: paper alone. Nothing moves.
1.0–3.2s: the ensō is brushed clockwise from about seven o'clock, trailing off in dry-brush streaks just short of closing.
3.2–4.2s: stillness.
4.2–5.6s: the kanji (110px) emerges vertically to the left of the circle with the ink bleed.
5.6–6.8s: the brand name and tagline fade up below the kanji line by line, 0.3s apart, rising 6px.
6.8–7.4s: the three words appear as one small line in pale ink.
7.4–7.7s: the seal presses in at the foot of the text column: scale 1.06 → 1 and full ink in 0.18s.
7.7–10.0s: hold, completely still.
For other durations, scale every timestamp proportionally.
</structure>

<build>
One self-contained index.html, CSS and JS inline. Google Fonts via <link> are fine; no other libraries (no three.js: this style is flat). Draw in Canvas 2D, repainting every frame from scratch. Canvas won't fetch fonts itself: await document.fonts.load() for each face, then define window.seek. The stage is 1920×1080 (16:9), scaled to fit the window. Design for 60fps. window.seek(t), t in seconds, must compute every visual from t alone: no CSS transitions or animations, no setTimeout or setInterval, no state carried between frames, and randomness only from a seeded PRNG. Without ?render in the URL, drive seek from requestAnimationFrame so it plays in a browser (loop after a 1s end hold); with ?render, don't start that loop.
</build>

<check>
Before showing me, step through one frame per second: screenshot each and look at it. Fix overlaps, clipped or cramped text, accidental edge collisions, and anything off-style or Banned. Check the frame stays mostly empty paper and the stroke reads as one gesture. Confirm seek(duration) and seek(duration + 1) match, so the final frame holds.
</check>

Ours, and free to use under CC0: copy it, change it, ship it. No credit needed.

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