How this site is made.
A colophon is the little note at the back of a book about how it was made — the type, the paper, the people who touched it. I've always loved them. So here's mine: the decisions, the borrowed wisdom, and the folks who deserve the credit.
Design decisions
Stripped down on purpose. My old site had twenty years piled on top of it. This one is built to be read in a couple of minutes — the work up front, the story a click away, and not much else.
Honest outcomes. Where I don't have a hard number I can stand behind, I don't invent one. The project cards say what I actually owned and did.
A manifesto, not a competency list. Instead of "here's how I get along with your PM," I wrote down what I actually believe. It's more useful, and more me.
Motion that behaves. The photo crossfades are pure CSS — no JavaScript — and they hold still for anyone who's asked their device to reduce motion.
Where the themes come from
The palette started as photographs of my house.
The plain Light and Dark themes are the safe, universal ones. But there are two more in the switcher I actually care about — Home Day and Home Night — and they're built from my own rooms.
I gathered up a few of my favorite snapshots of my spaces at the hours I love them: morning light on the kitchen cabinets, the amber glow of the living room after the lamps come on, a record on the turntable, the brick exterior going blue at dusk. Then I pulled the colors that kept showing up.
The same handful repeated in nearly every frame — warm incandescent amber, a muted teal-sage that lives on the vinyl and the accent lights and the bottle-green cabinets, terracotta brick, charcoal, and a lot of warm off-white. A dusty mauve off the big botanical rug snuck in for the playful bits. Mid-century modern with a bohemian streak: warm, lived-in, a house full of records and plants and treasures from past adventures.
Background / Base
Linen
Page backgrounds, light surfaces, off-white text on dark fields
Primary warmth
Amber Glow
Buttons, highlights, key links — the incandescent warmth of the interiors
Signature accent
Sage Teal
Navigation, borders, secondary actions — drawn from the teal vinyl record
Warm accent
Terracotta
Tags, badges, alerts — the brick exterior and red-lit room
Dark anchor
Charcoal
Headings, body text, dark surfaces
Deep green
Forest
Dark card surfaces, footer — the deep evening foliage outside
Cool neutral
Slate Mauve
Captions, muted labels, subtle dividers — the dusty botanical rug
Warm neutral
Honey Wood
Decorative accents, icon fills — the mid-century wood grain throughout
Eight colors, straight off the walls, the shelves, and the yard.
Home Day is that palette in full sun. Home Night is the same rooms after dark — the amber warms up, the sage brightens, everything eases into evening. The site chooses between them by the clock on your device, so if you're reading this after dinner, you're seeing my living room at night.
Type
- Logotype
- Planet eStyle, a rounded 1996 typeface by Mads Rydahl of Planet, in Denmark. Free for personal use — he asks only for a credit, which I'm glad to give. I subsetted it to the eleven letters my name needs, so it loads in about two kilobytes.
- Headlines
- Fraunces, a warm old-style display serif by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi of Undercase Type. Open-source (SIL Open Font License). It has an optical-size axis, so it turns dramatic and high-contrast at headline size and settles down for smaller subheads — I use it for headings, subheads, and pull-quotes, never body. I subsetted the variable cut to Latin, so it loads in about forty-five kilobytes. And yes: the ampersand is half the reason I fell for it.
- Body & interface
- Inter, with the system sans-serif as a fallback — fast, familiar, and legible on every device. Fraunces is the voice; Inter does the reading.
People whose work shaped this
A short list of the heroes rattling around in my head.
- Bruce Mau
- The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth and Massive Change — where I first learned design could be a force for good. The manifesto on this site is a distant, grateful cousin of his.
- Bill Strickland
- The social entrepreneur who put words to the nonprofit-meets-for-profit hybrid that's still my north star.
- Yuri Rasovsky
- The Chicago radio producer who founded the National Radio Theater — and whose little manifesto gave me my favorite word, colleaguery.
- Ian MacKaye
- Fugazi and Dischord Records: courage of conviction, and using your platform for exactly what you believe. Do it, or don't bother.
Photography & credits
Most of the photos here are mine or my family's. Two press images belong to their photographers:
- Leader-Telegram
- The 2015 "Connecting with neighbors" front page — staff photo by Elizabeth Jackson.
- The Atlantic
- The Obama tech-team photo in "When the Nerds Go Marching In" — by Daniel X. O'Neil.
Built
Plain HTML and CSS — no framework, no build step, no trackers, nothing watching you. It's small enough that you could open the source and read the whole thing top to bottom, which feels right for a site about designing with the grain of how things actually get made.