Colophon

This site is built as a single object — a mathematical atlas. The home page is its title page, the essays and the research log are its chapters, and the interactive visualizations are its numbered plates. The aim is that every page reads as part of one engraved instrument rather than a stack of unrelated screens.

The aesthetic

The visual language is an engraving on paper. Depth comes from line weight, density, and negative space — never from glow, glass, or gradients. The palette is deliberately small: a paper ground #efe9da, an ink near-black #1c1a17, a single vermilion accent #c0492f, and a reserved prussian blue used only as a second ink in diagram plates. A faint paper grain sits over everything as a multiply texture.

The type

Two families do all the work. Spectral, a screen-built serif, sets the running text and the display headings, with its italic carrying emphasis and the vermilion. JetBrains Mono sets labels, plate numbers, data read-outs, and captions. Both faces are self-hosted, so the most load-bearing brand asset never depends on a third party. Figures are old-style in prose and lining, tabular in the read-outs.

The plates

Each plate in the atlas is a small standalone instrument drawn on an HTML canvas, sharing one design system (plate.css and a handful of drawing helpers in plate.js): paper, ink, hairlines, faint construction rings. There is no charting library and no WebGL — the marks are drawn directly, the way the rest of the site is. Animation is deliberate: loops pause when their tab is hidden or scrolled out of view, and a reader who asks for reduced motion is shown the finished figure at rest rather than its drawing.

The build

The site is a static build produced by Astro, with no client-side framework shipped to the browser. Mathematics is written in LaTeX and typeset with KaTeX; diagrams are SVG. Everything is generated at build time and deployed to GitHub Pages on each push to main. The source lives on GitHub.

Reading apparatus

Chapters carry a table of contents, an estimated reading time, and tags that resolve to a real subject index. The lexicon defines the vocabulary, the notation index keys the symbols, the library records the works it all stands on, and the timeline places the ideas in order. A feed tracks new writing.

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Set in Spectral & JetBrains Mono. Built with Astro and KaTeX. Drawn by hand on canvas. MMXXVI.