The critic, round 1

Hilum is a convincing noho-style site. It has the paper-tone split hero with saturated flat tiles, flat cards with no radius, and the kraft curtain footer with a multicolour wordmark. Its twist is that every picture is a bean drawn in code. The pinned "one summer" growth scene reads clearly in the motion frames (hook, first leaves, twining, dry pods, with a day counter) and is a real signature moment. The code-drawn art is good enough to stand beside noho's photography in the catalogue grid. It falls short of Site-of-the-Day level in two ways. The display type is lighter and less punchy than noho's semibold, tightly tracked headlines. The seams between sections are rougher than the reference: the pile slides over the plant, headlines get clipped under the chrome boxes, and mobile has empty stretches during the collapse and footer.

• The code-drawn bean engine: 20 distinct, believable seed-coat patterns, pods, flowers and jars. It works as art direction, not as a placeholder.
• Pinned growth scene with the day counter and a stage stepper whose active row lights up. It is botanically correct (a hooked stem, anticlockwise twining) and reads cleanly frame by frame.
• Palette restraint that follows noho: paper, paper-2 and kraft tones, with colour living only in the tile grounds and beans, and scarlet reserved for availability and the season pill.