Colophon

On the typefaces, the mark, and the machinery behind this site.

Type

The text is set in Spectral, drawn by Production Type for the screen. It is cold, sharp, and bears long reading without turning decorative. Headings and the opening line are set in Fraunces, a variable old-style face with high contrast and a trace of the incunabulum about it — a fitting quality for a site concerned with what print did to knowledge.

Both are served from this domain rather than from Google. Google Fonts logs IP addresses, and a German court has held that this constitutes an unlawful transfer under the GDPR. Four cuts, 85 kilobytes in total, subset to Latin and Norwegian.

The mark

A pair of parentheses, cut from Fraunces at its heaviest weight. They appear in the tab, on the share card, around the biography on the front page, and around whichever tab you are standing on.

The choice is not arbitrary. The Gutenberg Parenthesis — Lars Ole Sauerberg’s and Thomas Pettitt’s term — is the proposition that the five centuries of print were a bounded interval rather than a destination. A site arguing that the parenthesis is now closing may as well wear it.

Colour

The paper is a cool bone, the ink a near-black with a green cast, and the mark a deep spruce. Dark mode is a separate palette rather than an inversion.

Machinery

The site is static. It is built with Hugo from a folder of text files, versioned in Git, and published through GitHub Pages. There is no database, no login page, and no server-side code to break.

There is also no analytics, no cookies, no tracking pixels, and no third-party requests — with the exception of the contact form, which is contacted only when you press send.

All the content is plain Markdown. It will be readable by a person in fifty years without the software that wrote it, which is rather the point.

Photographs

The portrait is by Anders Halvorsen Fehn at FFI.