Recent changes

Append-only record of wiki changes.

[2026-07-24] init | Wiki scaffolded | Updated: (none) | Notes: Created raw and wiki folder structure plus initial schema, index and log. No sources ingested.

[2026-07-26] ingest | Initial Semblance source set | Updated: identity, audience, offers, voice, proof, market, strategy, frameworks, index, schema | Notes: Ingested the May 2026 site-content and business-positioning documents, the June 2026 website build specification and confirmed user corrections dated 2026-07-26. Preserved all source files unchanged in raw/. Website structure follows the June build specification: six homepage sections and no Process page. Semblance is treated as approximately five years old and transitioning into Gavin's primary professional focus. Removed or qualified unsupported claims including unlimited style range, production at any scale, turnkey procurement/installation, flat-fee pricing and a precise global decision-maker count.

[2026-07-27] tooling | Static browsing site | Updated: (no article content changed) | Notes: Added build_site.py, which generates a read-only Wikipedia-style HTML site into site/ from the existing markdown. Article text, frontmatter and sources are unchanged — the generator only reads. site/ is gitignored and rebuilt with python3 build_site.py. Lint finding surfaced, not yet resolved: nine articles cite 2026-07-27-user-decisions.md, which is not present in raw/; those citations are flagged "not in raw/" in the generated pages. Also noted: the frontmatter key in wiki/identity/brand-overview.md reads ources: rather than sources:.

[2026-07-27] correction | Frontmatter typo | Updated: identity/brand-overview | Notes: Corrected the frontmatter key ources: to sources:. Metadata only — no article content, positioning, audience, offer, pricing or strategy claim was changed.

[2026-07-27] unresolved | Missing source 2026-07-27-user-decisions.md | Updated: (none) | Notes: Nine articles list this file in frontmatter — audience/primary-clients, identity/brand-overview, identity/positioning, market/market-boundaries, offers/custom-artwork-commissions, offers/scope-and-exclusions, offers/secondary-artwork-services, proof/project-portfolio, voice/messaging-guide. The file is absent from raw/, absent from raw/SOURCE-REGISTER.md, and has never existed in git history. No article cites it inline, so the specific claims drawn from it cannot be isolated. It was not reconstructed: doing so would require inferring its contents from the articles that cite it, which is circular. Citations remain flagged "not in raw/" in the generated site. Related gap: nine articles carry last_updated: 2026-07-27 but no ingest entry for that date was logged.

[2026-07-27] compile | brandbrain.md | Updated: (none) | Notes: Created brandbrain.md at repository root, a condensed portable working summary derived from the wiki for downstream use. 1,496 words. No wiki article was modified. Negative rules, exclusions, claim limits and AI constraints consolidated into a single section. Confidential Saatchi / Florida material excluded entirely and remains only in wiki/proof/saatchi-florida.md. Verified quantitative evidence retained for BoTree, Meyer Werft, Singita, Rockefeller and the Artlink adaptation project, with commissions, placements, adaptations and licensing kept distinct. Boilerplate at 25, 50 and 100 words approved by Gavin Goodman on 2026-07-27; the 100-word version was supplied by him and names The BoTree Hotel and a European cruise liner. Domain recorded per user decision as semblance-studios.com, purchased and not yet live. Client name corrected per user decision to Cramer & Bell in brandbrain.md; the nine wiki articles still read Kramer and Bell and were deliberately left unchanged, so the two now disagree. Approved by Gavin Goodman for commit.

[2026-07-27] user-decision | One Word exercise | Updated: raw/2026-07-27-one-word-decision.md, wiki/identity/positioning.md, index.md | Notes: Ran the One Word exercise against brandbrain.md with the wiki used to verify evidence. Decision sequence recorded in full. Unresolved → Resolution was considered and provisionally selected, then rejected before any file was changed, for two reasons: Resolution collided with Semblance's recurring technical language around high-resolution image files, and the pair was circular, describing completion while providing no meaningful failure condition. Misfit → Belonging was then adopted provisionally as the stronger internal lens. Belonging is origin-neutral and may be achieved through commissioned, adapted or selected existing work; Singita, an existing-work placement rather than a commission, is the primary evidence, with Meyer Werft complementary as belonging reached through custom development. Misfit remains an unverified hypothesis and must not be asserted as outward-facing client pain until representative client language has been reviewed. The pair is an internal lens only: not a slogan, not a repeated website claim, not a named method. New source preserved at raw/2026-07-27-one-word-decision.md and added to the positioning frontmatter. brandbrain.md deliberately left untouched. No accepted positioning, audience, offer, pricing or public claim was changed.

[2026-07-27] audit | Phantom source 2026-07-27-user-decisions.md | Updated: identity/positioning, identity/brand-overview, audience/primary-clients, market/market-boundaries, offers/custom-artwork-commissions, offers/scope-and-exclusions, offers/secondary-artwork-services, proof/project-portfolio, voice/messaging-guide, index | Notes: Structural repair only. 2026-07-27-user-decisions.md is confirmed a phantom citation: it was never present in any commit, branch, stash or recoverable git object, never listed in raw/SOURCE-REGISTER.md, and all sixteen dangling blobs were inspected and accounted for. The citation has been removed from the frontmatter of the nine articles above. No body claim was removed, rewritten, narrowed or newly approved in this pass. 2026-07-26-user-decisions.md was added to voice/messaging-guide, which had never cited it despite depending on it for the rejected phrases "turnkey installation", "set it and forget it" and "zero risk"; that article therefore ends with four sources. Source counts corrected in index.md for the nine affected articles plus two pre-existing errors unrelated to the phantom, in identity/brand-boundaries and identity/brand-overview. A full claim audit against the five preserved raw sources found four themes with no traceable source anywhere in the repository; these remain in the articles unchanged and pending explicit treatment: copyright, licensing, reproduction and buyout policy; commercial terms and production timing; the Ensundu adaptation project details including the approximately 2,000 state-room reproductions; and voice and copy conventions. Absence of a source is not treated as evidence of what the phantom file contained. Separately noted for resolution: wiki/identity/brand-overview.md records the domain as semblance-studios.com while all three authoritative documents record semblancestudios.com. brandbrain.md untouched.

[2026-07-28] user-decision | Singita selection clarified | Updated: raw/2026-07-28-user-decisions.md, raw/SOURCE-REGISTER.md, proof/singita, index | Notes: Gavin Goodman confirmed that HK Design Studio selected the Singita artworks from Semblance's existing catalogue for a development it had designed, and that Semblance did not propose or curate the selection. singita.md updated: project type changed from "existing-work placement" to "existing-work selection", the selecting party named, and the "What this proves" section narrowed. The earlier bullets claiming relevance within high-end hospitality interiors, ability to complement an established interior direction and collaboration with an external design partner overstated Semblance's role, since the judgement in each case was HK Design Studio's; they were replaced with two narrower claims plus an explicit "What this does not prove" section. A second user decision recorded in the same source, covering Semblance's role relative to parameters supplied by the project team, is deliberately NOT yet integrated into any article, at the user's instruction, pending completion of the Thought Leadership pillar exercise. CONFLICT SURFACED, not resolved: wiki/identity/positioning.md treats Singita as the load-bearing evidence for the provisional Belonging lens on the grounds that belonging was reached "through selection rather than through making something new". That selection is now confirmed to have been HK Design Studio's, not Semblance's, which weakens the article's use of the project as evidence of a Semblance capability. Left unchanged pending user decision. Also noted: raw/2026-07-27-one-word-decision.md is absent from SOURCE-REGISTER.md.

[2026-07-28] user-decision | Belonging evidence restructured | Updated: identity/positioning, index | Notes: Resolves the conflict surfaced in the preceding entry. On Gavin Goodman's decision, the evidence order under the provisional Belonging lens is changed. The Artlink cruise adaptation and licensing project, using works from the broader Ensundu series, becomes primary evidence, because the adaptation was Semblance's own creative contribution to making an existing work answer a supplied project context; Artlink selected the works. Meyer Werft remains complementary as belonging through development. Singita is demoted from primary to supporting: HK Design Studio selected the works, so the project evidences third-party judgement about existing Semblance work, not a creative or curatorial action by Semblance. Two claims are now recorded explicitly and must be kept separate: (1) Semblance can adapt existing work to answer a project brief, a capability; (2) existing Semblance work is considered suitable for selection by established design teams, a third-party judgement. The second must never be folded into the first. Two consequential wording changes made in the same pass under the same instruction: "Semblance licenses, adapts and places existing work" became "adapts and licenses", since "places" implied an action Semblance does not perform; and the guidance bullet "do not present placement as a lesser route than commission" now reads "adaptation", having previously rested on Singita as its proof. WARNING, unresolved: the Ensundu project details, including the approximately 2,000 state-room reproductions, were identified in the 2026-07-27 audit as having no traceable source anywhere in the repository. That claim is now load-bearing for the primary positioning lens. It should be confirmed by the user and recorded as a source. No outward-facing claim was newly approved; the lens remains internal and provisional.

[2026-07-30] repair | Source rename and citation remap | Updated: all 19 wiki articles, SOURCE-REGISTER.md, README.md, build_site.py, index | Notes: The three source documents were rewritten and renamed outside the wiki tooling on 30 July, Brand Wiki.md was deleted, dated decision records moved to raw/decisions/, and SOURCE-REGISTER.md and README.md moved to the repository root. This entry records the repair of every reference to that reorganisation. Filenames updated across 19 articles: semblance_business_positioning_2026-05.md, semblance_site_content_2026-05.md and semblance_build_spec_2026-06.md become semblance_business_positioning.md, semblance_site_content.md and semblance_build_spec.md. Section numbering changed at the rewrite, so eight inline citations were remapped against the new documents rather than swapped: business-positioning §5 becomes §8 (singita, meyer-werft), §12 becomes §10 (client-acquisition), §8 becomes §§2, 6 (creative-director), §§3, 9–10 becomes §§7, 11–12 (brand-boundaries), and the build-spec citations in brand-boundaries and website-strategy now use §§2, 12 and §§4, 5, 12 respectively. The 1:54 and AKAA exhibition reference in creative-director moved to semblance_site_content.md, Creative Director, which is now its only source. TWO CLAIMS LOST THEIR SOURCE in the rewrite and are marked UNSOURCED in place, unchanged in wording, pending re-confirmation: the blue Luhlaza Pt2 image-substitution direction in proof/rockefeller-hotel, which has no equivalent in any current source; and the coastal photography, palette and brief description in proof/saatchi-florida, where the current §8 supports only completion and the 420-room triptych scope. PROPOSED CHANGE — needs approval, in strategy/website-strategy: the navigation and homepage headings previously read "Locked". The current BuildSpec §5 states the content sequence is a starting point that may be reordered during prototyping, so the wording was changed to match and the change is marked in the article for approval or reversal. The stale supersession sentence in the same article was replaced with the current 30 July precedence. SOURCE-REGISTER.md rewritten at the repository root: current sources registered with their new section counts, all three decision records registered including 2026-07-27-one-word-decision.md which had never been listed, design.md added because CLAUDE.md now names it in the website precedence, and Brand Wiki.md plus the three superseded documents moved to a "No longer active" section so the audit trail survives without treating them as sources. README.md rewritten to describe the repository root rather than raw/. build_site.py fixed: the raw collector now uses rglob so raw/decisions/ resolves, citations register under bare, raw/ and raw/decisions/ forms, root-level documents render as their own page kind, and the Source register nav link points at the root document. A rebuild reports zero unresolved citations, against nine before the repair. Repository re-scanned: no active file references an old dated filename, raw/SOURCE-REGISTER.md, the June 2026 build specification as current, or Brand Wiki.md as a source, and no internal link is broken. Remaining matches sit only in log.md, which is append-only history, and in the "No longer active" section of the register. last_updated was bumped only where body text changed, in rockefeller-hotel, saatchi-florida and website-strategy; the other 16 articles had frontmatter filenames corrected without a content change. No positioning, audience, offer, scope, pricing or public claim was changed.

[2026-07-30] user-decision | Repair decisions approved | Updated: strategy/website-strategy | Notes: Gavin Goodman resolved the three items left open by the repair above. The PROPOSED CHANGE in strategy/website-strategy is approved: the sitemap and homepage sequence are the approved starting direction for the prototype, with layout and section pacing free to change once tested in the build. The marker has been replaced with the approved provisional wording and the change is attributed and dated in the article. The sequence itself is unchanged. The two UNSOURCED markers in proof/rockefeller-hotel and proof/saatchi-florida stay as they are: both were judged minor historical detail that does not need resolution for the website build, so the claims and their markers remain in place and unverified. skills/brand-positioning-skills/ remains untracked and is excluded from both commits; it is installed third-party tooling with no dependency in either direction.