COLOPHON
How this site is set
A brief accounting of the typefaces, technology, and references behind the design.
Typefaces
Body and display are set in Newsreader, a serif by Production Type designed for editorial reading on screen, in its variable optical-size form. Newsreader is distributed under the Open Font Licence.
Chrome, marginalia, figure captions, and code are set in IBM Plex Mono, designed by Bold Monday for IBM. Plex Mono is distributed under the Open Font Licence.
Fonts are self-hosted as WOFF2 via Fontsource. No external font CDNs are loaded.
Stack
- Astro — static site generator with TypeScript in strict mode.
- Vanilla CSS with custom-property tokens. No framework, no utility classes.
- Notion as the content authoring environment, queried at build time via the official API.
- Pagefind for client-side full-text search, indexed at deploy.
- Vercel for hosting and deploy hooks.
- pnpm for package management.
Design references
The visual language draws on several traditions of mid-century technical publishing:
- NASA technical-report design from the Apollo era — cream paper, figure numbering, mixed serif and monospace.
- The Paul Rand period at IBM — restrained accent colour, strict grid, the precision of Helvetica-era marks.
- The Bell System Technical Journal — serious serif typography, formal article structure, dense footnotes.
- Massimo Vignelli's grid systems — ruled lines, deliberate hierarchy, no decoration without purpose.
Source
The repository will be made public alongside the launch of the commerce phase. Until then, anything documented in the notes and releases here is offered freely for reuse.