The QR, the live card of the piece and the status stone are Slab overlays parked on the terminal, not anything Easel draws — and `frame` filters Slab's own windows out of every capture, because its usual job is reading the machine underneath them. So every shot taken to judge the card's padding showed the terminal where the card is. Four rounds of "flush against the menu bar" were argued from pictures with no overlay in them. `--overlays` opts out of that exclusion, and widens a window shot to a padded crop so the menu bar it is said to be flush against is in the same picture. The default is unchanged: a frame is still the machine's real content. With the overlays visible, the adjustments they were waiting on: · twelve points of air below the title bar, for the rock and the card alike, so neither reads as window chrome · a drawn shadow instead of AppKit's — three points right and down, no blur. A soft aura is the wrong physics for a small screen resting on a terminal · corner radius 5 → 3, a cut corner rather than a rounded one · the card down from 152×114 to 128×96 And `easel/bin/design-loop.mjs`, which is the whole cycle in one command: close the Easel session, open a fresh one, wait for its overlays to land, photograph them. Fresh because overlays are placed once, when a window appears — editing the placement and reinstalling the menubar does not move what is already on screen, so the only honest check is a session that has never seen the old numbers. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>