Colophon
The marks, the type, and the machinery.
A colophon is the note a printer used to leave at the back of a book, saying who set it and how. This is mine. None of it is on the rest of the site by design, so it lives here for anyone who likes to know how a thing was made.
The Mark
An Eagle and a Serpent
The crest is two animals from the opening of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: an eagle wheeling overhead with a serpent coiled at its neck, the proudest creature and the wisest, keeping company. I read it as pride kept honest by a little cunning, which is about the best you can ask of either.
It is drawn as a fine-line engraving with a sunburst and a laurel, and it recurs around the site as a quiet maker’s mark rather than a logo that shouts. Same hand drew the project sigils.
The Type
Roboto, in Three Voices
Headings are set in Roboto Slab, a sturdy, bookish slab serif that sits between the classical and the modern without dressing up as either. Body copy is Roboto, a clean humanist sans, set at a comfortable measure. Roboto Mono is kept for the technical asides: dates, labels, the odd spec. It is the engineering accent, used quietly.
The Proportion
Sized by One Ratio
The display type is not hand-picked. Every large size is one step of a single ratio, a perfect fourth (4:3), from its neighbour. It is the oldest idea in the building: Vitruvius called it symmetria, the commensurability of parts, and Hambidge later pulled the same root rectangles straight off the Parthenon.
Nobody is meant to notice it. The page just reads as a touch more set than it would otherwise, which is the point.
The Names
They Carry the Rest
The codenames do the classical work so the surfaces don’t have to. stoa, the backend, is a Greek colonnade and the birthplace of Stoicism: order and calm. axon, a circuit simulator, is Greek for axis. PFC-I wears a Roman numeral. The aqueduct sigil is Roman engineering at its plainest, durable and right because it works. A classicist reads the etymology; everyone else reads a clean codename. Both are fine.
The Machinery
How It Is Built
Next.js and React on the front, talking to stoa, a Rust and TypeScript backend of mine, over a typed contract. The articles are written in Typst and rendered server-side. Colors are warm paper and ink in oklch, corners are kept crisp on purpose, and the whole thing is deployed on Railway.
The source lives on GitHub. If you want the longer story of the site itself, it is one of the projects.