Colophon

Most of what makes a page pleasant to read is invisible when it works. This page is the visible version: what this site is built from, and the reasons behind the choices you would otherwise only feel.

The design intent

The register is a quiet one — closer to a critical edition than to a product page. Dark mode is a warm archive-dark, light mode a warm paper, and both are first-class: the theme resolves before the first paint, so there is never a flash of the wrong one. Three typefaces do all the work: Source Serif 4 for the body, Fira Code for the mono apparatus — dates, labels, code, the small tracked eyebrows above sections — and Fraunces for titles, where the one big italic moment lives. Prose sits in a single centered column of about seventy characters; figures get a slightly wider stage. One royal indigo carries every interactive cue — links, focus rings, the reading-progress bar — and nothing else is colored for effect.

Charts follow a stricter law. Data colors come from the Okabe-Ito colorblind-safe palette, and one hue means one thing across the whole site — orange is always the failing path, blue always the fast one. Chart colors never leak into the interface, and interface colors never leak into a chart, so color stays evidence rather than decoration.

The reading apparatus

Every article is built to survive a 90-second skim: a TL;DR up top, a closing table, and a short FAQ at the end form a spine that carries the argument even if you read nothing else. Figures are theme-adaptive SVG, sized so their tick labels land at a readable 16px on the page, and each chart ships a data-table twin behind a small disclosure — the numbers are there to check, not just to look at. Captions interpret the figure rather than restate its title. Long articles get a collapsed contents block and an honest length note in the byline, because a thirty-minute read should say so up front.

Motion is spent sparingly. The few animations that exist are gated behind your reduced-motion preference, and print, reader mode, and JavaScript-off readers get every word visible by default — a page that arrives blank in an archiver is a bug here, not a tradeoff.

The stack

The site is built with Astro and ships as static pages. Interactive figures are small Svelte islands that hydrate only where they appear, each with keyboard-operable controls and a static table fallback for readers without JavaScript. Every design value — colors, type sizes, spacing, shadows, motion curves — lives in one token sheet that both themes and every component read from, which is how the pages stay one product instead of a collection of one-off decisions. There are no popups, no cookie banners, no comment widgets, and no share buttons; nothing here follows you off the page. There is an RSS feed at /rss.xml.

Who writes it

Every word here is written by a person. Every number in an article reproduces from committed code — if a figure makes a claim, a script generated it, and the prose, the caption, and the chart are kept in agreement. When something breaks that promise, write to me. The sites that shaped the taste here are on the blogroll.