Michael Lane

← All work · 2026

Unopened Worlds

A design piece: a museum for thirty-two sealed worlds

An exhibit of my design eye rather than my engineering. I art-directed a site for my collection of sealed Infocom games as a small private museum, with the voice of a curator, the conventions of a collector and the grammar of the games themselves.

The opening of unopenedworlds.com: Thirty Two Worlds, Unopened, in brass italic over warm black.Room 01, the collector’s wall: sealed Infocom boxes in brass frames, each with its year and name.The boxes are closed. The worlds are not. Zork and Planetfall, the two worlds brought back to life.Trinity’s exhibit page: the box art, collector badges, a Near Mint condition grade and a curator’s note.Zork I’s exhibit page, with the box art and the curator’s note.The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s exhibit page.
3
typefaces, one job each
4
colors: warm black, paper, brass, terminal green
32
boxes, each photographed and graded
What I did
The concept, the art direction, the typography and palette, the photography, every word, and every decision about what belongs.
What AI did
The implementation. Claude Code built the site to my direction and my eye.

The brief I gave myself

Make it feel like walking into a small private museum after hours, not like browsing a store. These are thirty-two objects I have spent years finding, and the design had to treat them the way a curator would: with restraint, with context, and with a little reverence.

Type that knows its job

Three faces, and each one does one thing. Cormorant Garamond is the voice of the museum: large, literary titles with italic asides (“Thirty Two Worlds, Unopened.”). IBM Plex Sans carries the reading. IBM Plex Mono is the voice of the machine: labels, room numbers, condition grades and status lines, all set in small capitals with generous spacing, the way a 1980s terminal would print them.

A palette from the objects

Warm black for the gallery walls. A paper tone, taken from the box art, for the text. Brass for the museum’s own signage and highlights. And one color that only appears where something is alive: a muted terminal green that marks the two worlds you can actually enter.

Three vocabularies, borrowed

The site speaks in three registers, all borrowed from the subject:

  • The museum’s. The home page is organized into rooms (“Room 01 / The Wall”). The opening is a curator’s statement. Each box has its own exhibit page.
  • The collector’s. Every box carries a condition grade (“NM, Near Mint”), noted honestly as photo and owner inspection rather than third-party certified, and badges for my own history with it: owned and played as a kid, finished, a favorite, still sealed.
  • The games’. Each exhibit page opens with a parser command (“> EXAMINE TRINITY”), and the header keeps a status line, “2 worlds online · 31 sealed · 1 unsealed”, the way Infocom kept your score.

What I didn’t do

No animations for their own sake, no carousel, no shop. The boxes are photographed straight on and framed alike, so the art on them does the talking. The restraint is the design.