Colophon

The site is built around one idea: it should feel like somebody is actually working here.

Some things are finished. Some are on the bench. Some are experiments that will never amount to anything. Everything carries a status, because pretending everything is complete would be both dishonest and quite boring.

Every page is deliberately shaped differently. Projects read like job cards. Ideas read like slips in a drawer. Now reads like a status board. Nothing here is a template with different words in it.

The visual identity is mid-century retro-futurism, and it isn't nostalgia.

Part of it is personal — my dad was born in the 1950s, so that decade has always been the world his generation arrived into, and my grandpa spent his career in engineering not long after.

The bigger reason is that I love their idea of the future. Jet aircraft, monorails, atomic power, cities in the sky, cars with fins. Some predictions were close, most were bonkers, and the accuracy is beside the point. What gets me is the confidence: a working assumption that if something didn't exist yet, somebody would go and build it.

This isn't a claim that the 1950s were better. They weren't, and this isn't a statement about the society of the time. What I'm borrowing is much narrower — the engineering optimism, the industrial design, and the belief that something better could be built.

Retro-futurism lets me use the visual language of yesterday's tomorrow to document what I'm building in the real one.

The long version →

Cream and charcoal do the heavy lifting. Mustard is the primary accent, with burnt orange, teal, faded blue and coral used to tell sections apart rather than to decorate them.

Each project, idea and section carries an accent, so colour means something instead of just being present.

• Mustard
• Burnt orange
• Coral
• Teal
• Ice blue
• Cream
• Charcoal

Three faces, each with a job.

Barlow Condensed for display type and labels, because condensed capitals are the language of equipment plates and technical drawings. Inter for body text, because the writing here is long and readability beats personality in a paragraph. JetBrains Mono for the technical furniture — project numbers, dates, status stamps and anything pretending to be stencilled onto a machine.

• Barlow CondensedDisplay, headings, platesFIX THINGS. BUILD THINGS.
• InterBody copyBuilt from curiosity. Made with purpose.
• JetBrains MonoTechnical furniturePROJECT_010 / REV 4 / ACTIVE

Painted, gouache-like, slightly imperfect, warm. Mid-century technical illustration rather than photography.

It suits the subject matter better than stock imagery ever could, and it means a story about a gas turbine paper from 1986 and a review of a screwdriver can sit on the same site without one of them looking out of place.

Where a real photograph would be better, there's a labelled space waiting for one. Those spaces describe the shot they're holding rather than pretending to be finished.

Deliberately boring. Content lives in Markdown and JSON files. A Python script turns them into plain HTML. There is no framework, no database and no build tooling worth mentioning.

The result is a set of static files, which is why pages load quickly on a phone in a car park — which is where a fair amount of the internet is actually consumed.

No cookies. No tracking. No analytics. No newsletter. Nothing here is trying to measure you.

The only external requests a page makes are for the web fonts. Links to live sites are links, never embeds, so nothing loads from anywhere else until you choose to go there.

The aesthetic never gets to win an argument with usability.

Semantic HTML, a skip link, visible focus states, keyboard-operable navigation and search, labelled controls, alt text written as a description of the picture rather than a caption, and contrast checked against the palette rather than assumed.

Animation is minimal and respects prefers-reduced-motion. Images load lazily. Nothing important requires JavaScript to read — the search and the drawer shortcuts are conveniences layered on top of a site that works without them.

Constantly, and usually at about eleven at night.

New writing gets a weight rather than a publication ceremony. Projects get updated in place. Ideas move between statuses and keep their history, because an idea that got shelved is more interesting with the reason attached.

Nothing on here is ever finished. A workshop where everything is finished is a showroom.