Colophon

Nine faces, all variable, all open licensed. Eight are the specimen cast, one to a class. The ninth, Source Serif 4, is doing two jobs at once — it sets every paragraph on this site and stands as the transitional serif in the cast, which /voice discloses rather than hides. Designer and licence for each were read from the google/fonts metadata, not from memory.

There is no accent colour on this site, and no sixth value. Active states, focus rings, live feedback and selection are all carried by inversion, rule weight or type weight. A page arguing that type carries meaning does not get to reach for a colour the moment it needs to signal something, and the constraint turned out to be productive: it forced the type sizes further apart than they would otherwise have gone.

The palette this site was briefed with set --gray at #78736A. Measured against the page it scores 4.04:1, and against the inset panels 3.62:1 — below the 4.5:1 that WCAG AA requires for text at these sizes, on both of the two surfaces it ever sits on. Since that value carries every label, caption and readout on the site, it failed everywhere it appeared. It was darkened to #635F57, which scores 5.45:1 and 4.89:1 and keeps the same warm cast.

The hairline value has a related constraint worth recording. --rule is 1.44:1 against the page, which is correct for a hairline and disqualifying for anything that bounds a control. So every slider track, thumb and focus ring on this site is drawn in ink or gray, never in rule, to clear the 3:1 non-text contrast floor.

Next.js 16 with the App Router, React 19.2, TypeScript in strict mode, Tailwind 4. Content lives in typed files in the repository — no CMS, no database, no accounts, and nothing is stored about anyone. There is no analytics script, no cookie banner and no newsletter capture, because the site collects nothing and so has nothing to ask for.

All motion is native CSS. Scroll-driven animation uses animation-timeline: view() inside an @supportsguard, so browsers without it get the final state rather than a broken page. There is no animation library. Three motion moves exist in total: page titles open their tracking on entry, the home page’s hero sets itself once on load, and reading text lifts in. Under prefers-reduced-motion every final state renders immediately.

The fonts are the interesting part of the build. Every axis range, OpenType feature list, glyph count and character grid on this site is read out of the shipped woff2 binaries by a script, so no axis range is ever typed by hand. Four of the nine faces had real ranges that differed from their published notes. The binaries are subsetted from the upstream originals with harfbuzz, retaining all layout features — an earlier pipeline subsetted by character range and silently destroyed the small capitals that /case exists to demonstrate, which is the sort of failure that ships.

Written, designed and built as a standalone editorial asset. The measure guidance on /measure follows Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style for the 45-to-75 character band, and the US Web Design System for the wider 45-to-90 working range. Typeface metadata comes from the google/fonts repository.

Eight faces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1. Roboto Slab is the exception, licensed under Apache 2.0. Both licences permit the embedding and subsetting performed here; the subsetted files carry their original name and licence metadata intact.