This site is made out of a lattice, three inks, two faces and a folder of plain text. Nothing on it was chosen for looks alone; where a value could be derived, it was.
the lattice
Everything is measured in modules. The module is a ninth of the stage height divided by eight, which makes a square sixty-four modules across, and every dimension in the system a whole number of them. There are no pixels here to speak of, and no chosen margins.
Every element carries two modules of pad on all four sides. Two elements side by side therefore leave four, and an element at the edge of the page leaves four as well, because the page supplies the missing half. Edge or neighbour, up or across, the gap is always the same and none of it was decided.
A page of prose is one column of sixty modules with those pads either side: sixty-eight modules, whatever the screen. Below the width at which that stops fitting, the module shrinks and the type does not — both regimes set the body at the same pixel size, so the breakpoint is invisible. What changes is the measure: about sixty-nine characters to a line on a wide screen, about forty-nine on a narrow one. The type is what is held constant; the line is free to get shorter.
the inks
Two grounds — warm anthracite for a screen, cool paper for print — and three inks on either. Black is the machine: the structure, the diagrams, the thing itself, and it is the great majority of any page. Blue is the hand describing, so it labels and it is what you can click. Red is the hand warning, and it is used for nothing else. There is no fourth colour, and colour never carries hierarchy — typography and space do that.
the faces
Prose is set in whatever the system offers, which is one face on a Mac and another on Windows. That difference is acceptable: prose is not where the identity lives, and a hosted face would be a dependency bought for nothing.
Notation is the exception — code, dates, labels, navigation, and notes, which are written in a notebook and should look it. It is set in a custom build of Iosevka with ligatures drawn for the marks I actually use. Until that build ships, the stack falls through to the system monospace and everything still sits on the grid.
the files
Every piece of writing here is a markdown file in a git repository, in plain CommonMark with no dialect at all, so it reads on GitHub and in any previewer that will ever exist. Where a page needs to say something about layout it says it in an HTML comment, which every tool preserves and none of them shows.
Images are the one thing kept out of git, because history is permanent and in eight years you would be cloning gigabytes to fix a sentence. The point of all of it is that the writing outlives the software that renders it.