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Carousel direction — lessons from 2026-05-25

This file captures everything we learned today. Not promoted to the canonical system yet (no renderer/brand-book changes). Once we ship 10 carousels in this direction and measure, we promote the winners into wiki/content/visual-references.md + scripts/viral_covers.py.

What Gustavs said (synthesized from voice notes)

Photo library is the bottleneck. Carousels that need a unique image per slide are blocked until we have an image-gen pipeline or a curated stock set.
What works right now: strong hook cover + white/black background value slides with plain typed text. "No huge art needed."
Slide 1: Gustavs photo + catchy hook + not too much info → people swipe to see what's next.
Slides 2+: plain background, value-driven text, lime emphasis on the punchline phrase.
Target volume: ~10 carousels in this template.
Topic mix for @gotauts: business strategy, e-commerce, motivational, life lessons / experiments.
Content sourcing: pull from Gustavs's Telegram (t.me/gustavsgotauts) archive + podcast transcripts. Open question for Ansis.
Production model open: should this be automated, Ansis-made, or contracted out via chat once we have the source doc?

Reference templates seen today

R5 — `gustavsgotauts-dark` (the today's-internal benchmark)

Cover: blurred lifestyle/product photo bg + lime-emphasized ALL-CAPS headline + optional "live visitors" pill + Telegram chip top-left + bold-final-word subhead
Inner: pure black bg + centered humanist sans (Quicksand/Nunito-like) + lime-green emphasis phrase + bottom-centered Telegram chip
Slide arc: hook → setup → realization → result → CTA-task
Status: this is the immediate ship-format. Not yet in the renderer.

Nicci Lee Ellison (cover→white listicle)

White bg + author chip top-left (avatar + name + role) + bold H1 sections + body + comma-tag list + lime underline accent + "Save this post" bookmark
Ship-able now (no photo bottleneck for inner slides). Best fit for educational listicles.

TV3 Ziņas (LV news-doc)

Cover: full-bleed photo, channel logo top-left, bottom-left bold white headline, red swipe arrow
Inner: dark grainy bg + dense body copy in serif/sans + tiny red brand mark + slide accent
Ship-able now. Best fit for "news-style" carousels (longer reads, fewer carousels per topic).

Pubity (perfect-day listicle) — PHASE 2

Photo-per-item with yellow time stamp + white subhead overlay; collage cover
Blocked on photo supply (1 hero photo per slide × 10 slides)
Unblock with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image once we wire it

@wealth — already catalogued as R4 — PHASE 2

Multi-photo composite covers + hero-per-item ranking slides
Same image-supply blocker. Unblock with Gemini image-gen.

What changes for the engine (proposed, NOT applied yet)

New renderer mode gustavsgotauts-dark in scripts/viral_covers.py with frontmatter contract:
headline_main, headline_emphasis_word, subhead, subhead_bold_word, live_visitors?
slides[].body, slides[].emphasis_phrase, slides[].italic?, slides[].brand_chip (default t.me/gustavsgotauts)
Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview) as image-gen backend for R4 / Pubity covers — same API key we use for the CEO agent. ~$0.039 per 1024×1024 image at current pricing. Unblocks every photo-heavy template.
Content ingest: Telegram (t.me/gustavsgotauts) export + podcast transcripts → concept pool, fed into hook-batch generator.

What we're doing right now (the 10-carousel test)

10 drafts in the gustavsgotauts-dark template, sourced primarily from wiki/founder/quotes.md (verbatim Gustavs lines). After publish + perf data, decide which template/style to promote.

Files: wiki/content/drafts/2026-05-25-ggk-*.md

Open follow-ups

[ ] Ansis to confirm: production model — auto / manual / outsourced via chat?
[ ] Wire Telegram archive → concept extraction
[ ] Wire podcast transcripts → concept extraction
[ ] Decide: do we bake gustavsgotauts-dark into the renderer before or after perf data on these 10?
[ ] Decide: Gemini image-gen — pilot it on R4 wealth-style first, or skip and focus on type-only templates?