Colophon

About this site and the thinking behind it.

Why It Looks This Way

This site is designed to feel like a patent drawing come to life : warm parchment, india ink, and the careful precision of technical documentation. The dot-grid background, hand-drawn accent, and editorial typography are deliberate. They signal that this is a working space for someone who reads footnotes and visits primary sources.

The aesthetic borrows from engineering notebooks, architectural blueprints, and field journals. If the site feels like something you'd find on a drafting table rather than in a boardroom, that's the intention.

Tech Stack

  • Framework: Next.js 15 (static site generation)
  • Styling: Tailwind CSS v4 + CSS custom properties
  • Hand-drawn elements: rough.js + rough-notation (sparingly)
  • Interactive components: React 19
  • Fonts: Vollkorn, Cabin, Ysabeau, IBM Plex Sans, Courier Prime, Space Mono
  • Icons: Phosphor
  • Hosting: Vercel
  • Content: Markdown files, no CMS

Typography

The site uses three typography systems that shift by context. Vollkorn carries editorial weight in headings: a sturdy, old-style serif that grounds every page title. Cabin handles most body text as a humanist sans that shows the calligrapher's hand without shouting about it.

For essays and technical pages, IBM Plex Sans steps in as the body face, more clinical, more precise. Labels and metadata are always set in Courier Prime: uppercase, tracked, monospaced, evoking typewritten case files and document stamps.

The toolkit pages use Ysabeau, a glyphic humanist sans that suggests letters chiseled into stone. It gives those pages an architectural, structural feel distinct from the editorial warmth elsewhere.

Design Philosophy

Every design decision on this site was made with the same question in mind: does this serve the content, or does it serve the ego of the designer? Ornament for its own sake is out. Warmth and texture that invite you to read are in.

The hand-drawn underline on the homepage is the only rough.js element that's truly decorative, and it's a statement. It says: this work is in progress. The ideas are real, but they're still being shaped. Nothing here pretends to be final.

Credits

Built with Next.js, styled with Tailwind CSS, illustrated with rough.js by Preet Shihn. Fonts self-hosted via next/font. Hosting by Vercel.

The site was largely built with Claude Code, which means an AI wrote most of the markup, but a human made all the design decisions. That distinction matters.