Grand Staircase Escalante Partners
how monumental love looks, sounds, and behaves
This is a small campaign with a specific job: to gather a public, community-authored record of what this landscape means to the people who know it. Everything in this guide exists to keep that record feeling like it came from Boulder and Escalante — not from a marketing department.
If you remember nothing else, remember these. Every choice below descends from them.
Desert-at-dusk, not desert-at-noon. Warm neutrals carry the page; saturated colour is used sparingly and always means something.
Three faces, each with one job. Never add a fourth.
Fredoka 600. "Monumental" in plum, "Love" in orange, the colon in canyon. The tagline sits directly beneath in Space Mono, lowercase, letter-spaced 0.08em.
The colon is not decoration — it opens onto whatever follows. On the site it opens onto the landscape; on the placard it opens onto the invitation.
Every surface carries a crosshatch overlay at 5% opacity, multiply blend. It is what keeps the palette from looking like a tech product. It is applied once, fixed, at the page level.
.grain{
position:fixed; inset:0; pointer-events:none;
opacity:0.05; mix-blend-mode:multiply; z-index:100;
background-image:
repeating-linear-gradient(115deg,transparent 0 2px,#000 2px 3px),
repeating-linear-gradient(25deg,transparent 0 3px,#000 3px 4px);
background-size:6px 6px, 8px 8px;
}
The hand-painted canyon illustration is the only image the brand owns. It appears once per surface, always at the bottom edge, always fading up into cream so type can sit above it.
It is painted, not photographed, and that matters: the campaign asks people to make art, so its own imagery is made by hand. Photography belongs in the gallery, contributed by the community — not in the chrome.
Do not use stock photography, AI-generated landscapes, or a second illustration style anywhere in this project.
Warm, plain, and unhurried. Short sentences. Concrete nouns. The register of a neighbour explaining something on a porch, not an organisation issuing a statement.
State what happened with dates and numbers, link the source, and stop. No adjectives, no characterisation of motive. The facts are severe enough that describing them plainly is the strongest available move — and it is the only version a person who disagrees with us will keep reading.
Where the campaign takes a position, it does so through what it builds, not through what it says about opponents.
The nine nations named in GSEP's land acknowledgment appear at the top of the page, before the organisation describes itself. That placement is the point. GSEP's Native Perspectives page uses a longer thirteen-name list with the qualifier "including (but not limited to)" — no list is complete, and the language should never imply otherwise.
Reproduce GSEP's own acknowledgment wording exactly, including its spellings. Do not paraphrase it, improve it, or write new language on this subject. Anything beyond the existing wording should be reviewed by the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, not written in-house.
Everything that exists, what it is for, and how it is made.
| Asset | Spec | Use |
|---|---|---|
| index.html | Self-contained, ~1.3 MB | The art submission call to action. Images embedded as base64 — no external files except Google Fonts. |
| monument.html | Self-contained, ~950 KB | Background, policy timeline and sourced reading list. Every factual claim carries a link. |
| 404.html | Self-contained | "Boundaries move. Pages move. The land stays where it is." |
| monumental-love-postcard.pdf | 8.5×11 in, 1 page, black & white | Print at home. Front and back of a 6×3.9 in card plus Show/Tell/Promise directions. Mono-laser safe. |
| monumental-love-placard-4x5.pdf | 4×5 in, colour | Front-facing display card for the postcard stand. Print on card stock, matte. |
| og-image.png | 1200×630 PNG | Social share card for the main page. |
| og-monument.png | 1200×630 PNG | Social share card for the resource page. |
| netlify.toml | Config | Redirects /monument and /postcard, cache and security headers. |
| Code.gs | Google Apps Script | Postcard endpoint. doPost writes to the Sheet, doGet returns approved postcards as JSON. |
Postcard (home print). US Letter, portrait, 100% scale — not "fit to page," which shrinks the card below postal minimums. Plain paper works; card stock is better. Cut on the dashed lines. Finished card is 6×3.9 in, inside USPS postcard limits.
Placard. 4×5 in, full bleed, colour. Matte or uncoated card stock — gloss fights the grain texture and the hand-painted illustration. Sits in a clear acrylic stand in front of the blank postcards, with the pen pouch beside it.
Web pages load Fredoka, Work Sans and Space Mono from Google Fonts. Print assets embed them directly, so PDFs render correctly on any machine with no network connection. All three are open licence (SIL Open Font Licence) — free to use in print and digital, no attribution required.
Digital submissions post to a Google Apps Script web app, which writes to a Sheet. Only rows marked
approved are published to the site's public gallery.
Moderate before publishing. These are strangers' words going onto a public page under a real first name and town. The system fails closed: if the approval column is missing, nothing publishes.
Never publish more than first name and town. The consent line on the postcard promises exactly that, and it is the only promise the campaign makes to contributors about their own data. Email addresses are used for one thing: telling someone where their postcard ended up.
Blank postcards, a placard, and a pouch of pens and crayons sit at each host location. Finished cards go back in the pouch; GSEP collects them.
Host locations as of launch: the Boulder Mountain Lodge Lobby & Community Room, Anasazi State Park & Museum, the GSEP office in Escalante, and the GSEP booth at the Escalante Canyons Art Festival.
The site promises three destinations: the public collection, an exhibition, and the public record. That promise is the campaign's integrity. If a destination changes, change the copy the same day.
Before making anything new — a flyer, a sign, a social post, a slide — check it against four questions:
If any answer is no, it is not finished.