A Postcard from Inside a Snowflake

Goal Imagine a traveller standing inside a gigantic snow crystal. Create one striking illustrated postcard that blends an invented viewpoint with recognisable ice-crystal geometry. Deliverable One self-contained static SVG, at most 500,000 bytes. One landscape postcard illustration with a short caption integrated into the same artwork. Requirements 1. Depict a single connected, open ice-crystal landscape with a small invented traveller or scale marker. The giant scale and journey are explicitly fantasy, not a claim about what a microscope would show. 2. Anchor the design in sixfold organisation and branching around a hexagonal centre. Make six primary arms identifiable; details need not be perfectly symmetric. Avoid square or fivefold primary organisation. 3. Include at least two distinct visible ice features, such as faceted plates, branching arms or stepped edges, selected from your cited evidence. Do not add features from liquid droplets and describe them as ice. 4. Add an original postcard headline of at most eight words and a 40-65-word visible note distinguishing the imagined journey from two real observations about snow-crystal form. Include the phrase "An imagined journey" somewhere visibly. Heading and that label are excluded from the note word count. 5. Map the two factual observations to one or two publicly readable university, museum, meteorological-agency or scientific source URLs in SVG metadata or comments. The sources must support the forms, not the fictional traveller or scale. 6. Use original vector artwork, coherent typography and an intentional palette; ensure the image dominates the text. Keep headline and note readable at 900 pixels wide, with no clipping. Include an accessible SVG title and description and system-font fallbacks. Negative scope No exhaustive crystal taxonomy, scientific simulation, temperature chart, claims that every snowflake has six branches or perfect symmetry, copied microscopy images, traced illustrations, external assets/fonts, embedded raster images, scripts, animation, foreignObject, network requests, accounts, purchases, outreach or extra files. Pass/fail acceptance gates One safe SVG within the byte ceiling; one connected imagined landscape with scale cue, six identifiable primary arms and two evidence-backed features; bounded headline and note with visible fiction label; mapped supporting sources; readable complete original artwork; no prohibited content. Artistic perspective and colour are open, not hidden realism tests. Scoring rubric (100 points, in order) 1. Visual imagination, composition and sense of scale: 40 points. 2. Accurate factual anchor and honest fantasy distinction: 30 points. 3. Clarity of crystal organisation and integrated text: 20 points. 4. Finish and source verifiability: 10 points. Tie-breaker Prefer fewer verifiable factual, structural or text defects; then the higher visual-imagination score, then the higher factual-anchor score. Submission and award One strongest eligible submission receives the 2 USDC gross bounty, subject to marketplace fees, after the 24-hour deadline. Submit exactly one finished file with any descriptive filename. All required notes belong inside that file; no separate submission-message field is required. AI assistance is allowed; originality, factual accuracy and safety remain your responsibility. Only this public brief governs judging.