HOW THIS SITE WAS BUILT · THE KING & PRINCE

MARSH LIGHT

The calmest site of the family: rhythm as something the landscape already does, twice a day, without being asked.

01 THE DESIGN DIRECTION

Luminism,
on the grid.

The school of design is American Luminism — the 19th-century painters of tidal flats and low coastal sun, who built entire pictures out of horizontal bands of light — set on the 248 brand grid. The King & Prince plays golf on hammocks in the Marshes of Glynn, where the drama is not severity but illumination: light moving over cordgrass twice a day. So where Winged Foot withholds, this site glows — through discipline. Bands of light, hairline rules, and one big warm horizon; never beach-resort kitsch, no palm clip-art, no aqua gradients.

Palette: the brand tokens warmed toward coastal light. Bone leans golden (#F8F4EA), the tint band leans further (#F2EAD5), and two course-derived support colors appear only as thin bands and tints — marsh gold (#B08A33) in the sky bands, grass strokes and the forward-looking note's rule, and tidewater blue-gray (#6C7F86) in the creek band and the ribbon's flood bars. Signal Lime stays the system signal: the 8-unit conversion cluster, active player states, and the island-hop sequencer chips. Accent Orange appears once per screen — the hero's ampersand, and the low sun in the diagram.

Type is the brand trio — Barlow Condensed for display (700 for the hero), Inter for text, IBM Plex Mono for data — plus Instrument Serif italic used strictly for one editorial pull-line about the marsh on each page. Motion follows the tide: the 24/8 ribbon gathers like the flood and releases like the ebb at true system tempo, the water shimmer breathes at bar tempo in silence, and while the anthem plays the beat physically crosses the diagram, island to island, at 112 BPM.

The signature visual is THE HAMMOCKS: a layered horizontal marsh diagram — sky bands, cordgrass, tidal creek, four elongated island shapes labelled 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 with bridge dashes between them — over a canvas water band running a slow specular shimmer. Audio playing turns it into a four-step sequencer: hole chips light in turn on the beat and ripple wavelets propagate from the active island, with amplitude driven by the live RMS level. It explains the course's one-of-a-kind fact — four holes on marsh islands, 800+ feet of elevated bridges — while performing the brand's tempo.

02 HOW IT WAS BUILT

By hand,
at low tide.

  • Hand-written static HTML/CSS/JS — no framework, no authoring build step. One stylesheet, one ES module, one shared player core.
  • The marsh diagram is generated deterministically in JavaScript as SVG — a seeded PRNG (mulberry32) places every cordgrass stroke, island wobble and glint identically on every load. The creek band is a separate canvas layered behind the SVG inside the same scroll container, so shimmer, diagram and annotations stay registered at every width.
  • No raster imagery anywhere: type, hairlines, SVG and canvas only.
  • Fonts are self-hosted woff2 latin subsets via @fontsource: Barlow Condensed 500/600/700, Inter Variable, IBM Plex Mono 400/500, Instrument Serif 400 roman + italic.
  • All internal references are relative, so the site works served from a domain root or under a subpath (it deploys at /king-and-prince/ on the series hub). External URLs — the audio host, sibling sites — stay absolute.
  • Deploy pipeline: build.mjs copies the static tree to dist/ and restores font binaries from npm (deployAssets in package.json), so deploy uploads stay text-only.
  • Accessibility: skip link, semantic landmarks, one h1, labelled sections, focus-visible outlines, WCAG AA contrast (gold and tidewater are never used as text — bands and strokes only; lime never sits on bone as text). The diagram is a labelled role="img" figure with a full text description, and every moving part respects prefers-reduced-motion with a composed, fully annotated static state.
03 THE AUDIO PIPELINE

One track,
tide-timed.

Masters are large WAVs; delivery uses the library's compressed MP3/MP4-AAC versions, streamed from a shared CORS-enabled audio host (248-anthems-audio.vercel.app) whose manifest.json is the single source of truth. This site ships a fallback copy of the manifest and passes its playlist explicitly (playlistIds: ['king-prince-anthem']) because the deployed host's manifest predates the wave-two playlist keys. The player is the shared 248 core (player.js), skinned here as a lantern in the dark band: warm hairlines, a marsh-gold top rule, mono readouts, lime reserved for active states. The 32-unit stripe beneath it encodes real playback position. No placeholder audio and no fake visualization: the water's amplitude comes from the analyser's live RMS while playing, and in silence the shimmer merely breathes at bar tempo (4 × 60/112 s) — the brand's one permitted heartbeat.

04 THE FACTS RULE

Verified,
or absent.

Every course claim comes from the project's verified facts file. Used: Joe Lee design, opened August 1989, regarded as one of his finest; the ground at Hampton Point on the north end of St. Simons Island, part of the former 18th-century Hampton Plantation (cotton, indigo, rice); par 72 / 6,462 yards flagged explicitly as the pre-renovation card; holes 12–15 carved from marsh hammocks across a tidal creek, reached by more than 800 feet of elevated wooden cart bridges; the other fourteen framed by live oaks, salt marsh, lakes and lagoons; the October 2009 restoration by Billy Fuller, built by Medalist Golf; the Marshes of Glynn attribution given exactly as the file has it — the resort places the holes “in the famous Marshes of Glynn,” and Golden Isles tourism notes the marshes were made famous by Sidney Lanier's 1870s poem; and the resort's history — 1935 dance club, the hotel opened July 2, 1941, the Navy's WWII coast-watch and radar use, the 1947 reopening, Historic Hotels of America membership since 1996, NRHP listing 2005.

The in-progress transformation is presented honestly as a clearly framed forward-looking note (“The Next Tide,” dated as of July 2026): the $7M Beau Welling Design redesign with Chase Webb for South Street Partners, the move to a fully private model as The King & Prince Golf and Beach Club, and the expected November / late-fall 2026 opening. Omitted because unverified: the “Billy Walthour 2004 redesign” claim (sources credit Billy Fuller, October 2009), hole-by-hole yardages, course and slope ratings, and any Joe Lee or club-manager quotes. No lines of Lanier's poem are quoted — only the attribution the facts file carries. Island shapes in the diagram are labelled illustrative in its own title block; only the sequence and the bridges are presented as fact. Tempo claims are presented exactly as the science file allows — the 112 BPM grid as arithmetic, never as a lab result.

05 ITERATION PASSES

Three passes,
honestly.

PASS 1 — DESKTOP + MOBILE, HOME, PLUS 2× CLIPS OF THE DIAGRAM

Findings, and they were real: the sky's light bands rendered as five hard full-width stripes — mechanical wallpaper, not luminism; the creek canvas was a cold gray slab with hard cut edges; the bridge arcs started inside the island outlines, so the dashes read as one continuous wavy line passing through the hammocks instead of separate elevated spans; and the small-screen scroll position started 18% in, cropping the annotations mid-word ("…SHES OF GLYNN"). Fixes: the bands were rebuilt on a shared linear gradient that gathers toward the low sun and fades west, reduced in number and thinned; the water wash was lightened and warmed mid-band, with explicit shoreline hairlines added in the SVG so the creek reads as drawn rather than slabbed; the bridges were redrawn tip-to-tip outside the island outlines with three pile ticks per span, so the deck visibly stands above the water; the sun gained a soft halo and settled onto the band line; the caption gained a missing separator; and the diagram now starts scrolled to its margin so the annotations read first.

PASS 2 — RE-SHOOT BOTH ROUTES + STATES THE SHOT CAN'T SHOW

Re-shot desktop, mobile and the guide route clean. Verified under emulated prefers-reduced-motion that the figure renders one composed static shimmer frame, fully annotated, with no console errors. Forced a sequencer chip's active state in the DOM to confirm the lime step treatment reads at both scales — audio egress is blocked inside the build container (the expected tunnel errors for the audio host; the fallback manifest takes over by design), so the beat itself can only run in a real browser. A 768 px pass confirmed the two-column use grid and the stacked anthem panel hold between breakpoints. Known nit, kept: at some zoom levels a faint edge shows where the cordgrass baseline meets the top of the water band — it reads as a shoreline, which is what it is.

PASS 3 — SERIES EDITOR REVIEW

A series-level editorial review after all eight course sites and the flagship were complete: full-page desktop and mobile captures re-read, every on-page number cross-checked against the project's verified facts files, and cross-links audited across the whole family. This site's cross-links were already correct, and the fact check — including the hammock-hole sequence (12–15) and the 800-plus feet of cart-bridge footage — found no corrections needed. Mobile composition passed review with no further layout changes.

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