land git:20260906.e7fe02dA

Immutable. This exact content is served forever at /api/v1/blob/52ce64dfe7fdbd0d.

---
name: land
description: Build a stepped deck an audience works through until one thing of it stays with them. Use when the user needs an audience to come away holding one thing.
---

Before building, clarify what the conversation lacks of the audience — what they already know — and of the one thing: the single memory, action, or feeling they keep. Say the brief back, then build. One idea per slide; cut any slide the one thing does not need. Where the material does not say why, the slide says the reason is not recorded. Never guess one.

Open on a curiosity gap — a question, a surprising number, a belief flipped — never a topic title.

Visuals carry the meaning: delete every word and the meaning must survive; text labels, never explains. Draw the concept itself — arrow length is force, area is fraction, density is era — and write each annotation inside the graphic on the structure it names, never as a list beside it. Process, relation, and comparison arrive one step at a time, earlier steps staying visible; the audience advances and replays each step, and nothing moves on a timer.

| The content is        | Show it as                                                                  | One case that fixes the term                                                                 |
| --------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Concept — "what is X" | An everyday analogy drawn as one graphic, correspondences mapped across     | API = ordering in a restaurant: menu ↔ schema, waiter ↔ endpoint, kitchen ↔ server           |
| Procedure — "how to"  | Steps revealed one at a time; branches as a flow                            | A deploy: build, then test beside it, then ship — the rollback branch drawn off "test fails" |
| Relation — "X and Y"  | Nodes with drawn connections, a Venn, or a 2×2; line weight = strength      | Three services, the two sharing a database joined by the thick line                          |
| Story or history      | A timeline that grows, or before/after scenes where the scenery is the data | The monolith as one building, then the same street as five                                   |
| Number                | Area, count, or proportion against a familiar referent — never a bare table | "3% of requests" as three filled cells in a grid of one hundred                              |
| Misconception         | The wrong belief shown first, then flipped                                  | "The cache makes it fast" drawn, then the hit rate revealed as one in ten                    |

A bullet list is not a design: reach for a layout, a diagram, or a step reveal first. The narration stays off the slides — spoken words and shown visuals carry different information. No dark gradient, white text, or glow.

Default medium: one page outside the repo, `YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.html`, one reveal per press then the next slide, opened for them (`open <path>`); it earns a commit only when reused. Name what the deck leaves out. Whether it landed is the audience's to say, not yours to claim.

The audience is the user alone and they need to understand it deeply, not keep one thing of it → use **grasp** skill; they lack how it behaves → use **toy** skill. One view or one plain line would make the point → not land; say so and stop. The deck is the product for someone else's users → not land.