Colophon

A colophon is the note at the back of a book that records how it was made — the typefaces, the paper, the place, the year. This site is built as a frontispiece, a title page, so it gets one too. Here is how, and why.

The idea was plain: build the site as the title page of a larger body of work. A name, a short description, an address, and the way to the separate projects, each on its own site. Every choice came back to one question — does this belong on a title page? Most things didn't.

Three title pages stand behind it. Bodoni's Manuale Tipografico (Parma, 1788), for the conviction that a page should be mostly space, and that a few large words say more than many small ones. Jan Tschichold's Penguin title pages (1947–49), for optical setting — letters placed where the eye reads the centre, not where the ruler falls — and for hierarchy made from small capitals and spacing rather than size. Willy Fleckhaus's Bibliothek Suhrkamp, for the rest: a page of nothing but type, on warm paper, quiet enough to feel a little ceremonial.

The background colour is one of those quiet decisions. It isn't a generic off-white — the value is taken from uncoated book paper, the warm stock those books were printed on. It shifts slightly through the day, cooler in the morning and warmer toward evening, so the page keeps loose company with the hour. You feel it more than see it.

The build is deliberately plain: Astro and hand-written CSS, no framework, no utility classes, nothing that couldn't be read and understood later. Two typefaces, Fraunces and Inter Tight, both self-hosted — nothing loads from anyone else's server. The name at the top isn't live text but Fraunces' own letters, set, kerned and saved as drawn shapes. The site runs on Vercel, with its domain at Cloudflare and its mail at Proton.

A first visit is around 76 kilobytes; after that, with the fonts cached, about twelve. The only third party along the way is Plausible — a small script, loaded after the page is up, that counts the visit without setting a cookie and without recording anything that points back to you. The figure is here because it's true, and because keeping it low took some care — not because a low number is the point.

The site was built with the Kultmeister Website Operating System, a method I developed for restrained, typography-led sites and one of the projects listed here. This is the first time I've used it on my own page, which seemed the right place to start.