White Desert draws its layout grid over the photography

Nine white hairlines run top to bottom through every page of White Desert. They're the layout grid. The overlay ships on by default, fixed to the viewport, sitting over the photography the whole way down.

Malvah's Antarctic expedition site took awwwards Site of the Day on 11 September 2026, with 7.31 overall and 7.61 on the Developer Award. Of the four criteria, content scored highest at 7.74. That reads right. This is a site with very few words and a lot of landscape, and the craft is in how little it puts on top of the picture.

The layout grid is part of the art direction

The CSS is short. .grid-overlay is position: fixed, full height, pointer-events: none, mix-blend-mode: difference, opacity: .1. Inside it sit nine .grid-line divs, each 0.5px wide, filled with the brand white. Difference blending flips them dark over pale sky and pale over dark rock, so they track the photograph instead of lying on it. At 10% you catch them on the second look.

There's a body.hide-grid class that kills the overlay. Nothing on the site applies it. Showing the grid is the default state, and hiding it is the exception Malvah built and then left alone.

One photograph, one sentence, a pair of coordinates

Every hero runs the same template. Full-bleed photograph, the name centred in serif, one line of copy, and the location in square brackets along the bottom. Echo Base gets "Inspired by astronauts, used by explorers" and [71°32'47" S, 8°50'11" E]. Whichaway gets [70º 48' 00" S, 11º 23' 00" E].

The brackets are the move. They make the coordinates read as a field note instead of a caption, and they're the only chrome on a screen that's otherwise photograph and type.

Three typefaces, one job each

The display face is Cardinal Classic, the 2018 serif from Production Type by Jean-Baptiste Levée, Yoann Minet and Quentin Schmerber. White Desert loads two cuts of it under a single CSS family: Cardinal Classic Mid at weights 400 and 500, Cardinal Classic Long at 600 and 700. The cuts differ in x-height, and Long is the one the foundry recommends for titles.

Oswald handles exactly one word on the site. ANTARCTICA, condensed caps, run across the bottom of the homepage and cropped by the viewport. Inter Tight does everything you have to read: nav, prices, the six-step booking explainer.

The price is in the hero

South Pole & Penguins is titled in Cardinal italic, and directly beneath it, in bold Inter Tight, sits US $115,500. It's on the page before you ask for it. The itinerary cards on the homepage do the same, with the number set at the same size as the trip name.

Under the price: "visited by fewer than 500 people each year". The site sells with figures like that one all the way through. 4,220 km from Cape Town. 05:30 flight time. Minus 5°C average summer temperature. 12 guests per camp. 24 hours of continuous sunshine. That's where the 7.74 on content comes from.

What a judge would rate

The regions pages make the strongest case for the template. "The High Polar Plateau" breaks over two lines at display size, "Regions" sits above it in small italic, and the five sibling regions run along the bottom as pills. On a site about the emptiest place on Earth, holding back is the argument.

One thing I'd push on: those nav pills are frosted grey rectangles that sit heavy against everything around them, and on the brightest heroes the white label text loses contrast against the ice behind it. Small debt on a site that otherwise knows exactly how much to leave out.