On This Day share-card direction

Implemented in the v3 share renderer.

• The original historical image remains the primary visual.
• Event posters, action photography, and no-image entries use separate compositions.
• Post, Story, and square social layouts are composed independently.
• A real, original scanned xerox texture replaces procedural grit as the main surface.
• The palette is strictly black, white, and warm paper—no generic social-card gradient or accent color.
• The primary field is inverted black paper with pale toner damage and ghost type. Warm paper is reserved for ripped edges, image mats, and the metadata footer.
• Torn image mattes, halftone screening, paste-up title strips, registration marks, and toner damage create the 1990s zine language.
• Display titles use phrase-aware balanced wrapping. The fitter avoids one-word final lines, protects punctuation-led phrases such as UFC 3: / THE AMERICAN DREAM, and only reduces type after testing better line breaks.
• Text stays minimal: anniversary, moment title, original date, promotion, image credit, and compact MMA Matlock branding.
• Source attribution is printed on the card and retained in the copied caption.

Preferred technical direction

GitHub Actions pre-generates the rolling current-date cache through Sharp at 1080×1350, 1080×1920, and 1200×1200. The browser selects and shares the finished image. Dates outside the rolling cache use a matching black-and-white SVG fallback, so the visual direction does not collapse when a historical date is opened directly.

Image sourcing guardrails

• Search engines may discover candidates, but a search result is never treated as proof that a photo depicts the named event.
• Each published image must retain its source page and credit. Ambiguous fighter portraits, rematches, weigh-ins, and unrelated events are rejected rather than guessed.
• Additional collage images should be stored as explicitly curated candidates with event/date evidence and reuse status. The legacy single imageUrl remains the safe fallback.
• Paid editorial libraries such as Getty may only be added through an account and license that explicitly covers the rendered social output and its visual treatment.