Colophon

The Morgue

Two decades of work came off a 2011 website. The median surviving image is 560 pixels wide. So every asset gets a treatment assigned by what it is, not by how big it happens to be: type gets rebuilt as type, film runs at native resolution, a small scan is framed as a clipping and shown at its true size, and anything genuinely missing gets a hole with the year on it. The work itself is never filtered, screened, or recoloured. It appears exactly as it was made, because the work is the proof and a styled proof is no proof at all.

Nothing is ever upscaled. A 560-pixel file shown at 280 is sharper than retina. The same file stretched to 1200 is an apology. Small and sharp beats big and soft, every time. That is the whole argument, and it is only made here.

The pipeline is reversible by design. Crops are recorded, never burned in. Originals are never modified. Find a high-resolution master in a drawer and it drops in on the next build, and the smaller copy it replaces disappears without anyone editing a page.

The type

Archivo for display. A heavy American grotesque with a Franklin Gothic newsroom lineage. Newsreader for reading, at a 19-pixel floor that is not negotiable. IBM Plex Mono for anything that is data: kickers, datelines, receipts, credits.

Four colours. Ink, paper, one hazard yellow lifted straight off the HB757 signage, and an alarm red kept for corrections and killed items. If two things on a screen are yellow, one of them is wrong.

Every piece of text here clears WCAG AAA. 7:1 against its own background, in both themes, measured rather than assumed. The muted grey behind every deck, dateline and caption used to be 5.84:1, which is AA, and looks fine, and is not the same thing. It was darkened along its own hue until it read 7.16:1. There is a difference between a site that is accessible and a site that can prove it.

The glyphs

One icon family, drawn on the monogram's geometry: solid fills, square corners, one 24-unit grid, never the accent. Its spine is two four-part sequences that share a frame. An idea's life:

Nothing exists yet, it exists but nobody knows, they know and don't care, it has to move now. And a story's worth, from the Hook Check:

No dice, inside stuff, getting there, stop the presses. Same frame, filling up. The glyphs are always ink. The yellow belongs to action and to the flag that starts each section. The campaign images carry their own colour. They always did, and the palette rules govern the page, not the work.

The budget

The heaviest page here is about 15KB of HTML, gzipped. A case study paints in seven requests: the page, its fonts, and one photograph. Not one request on this site leaves this domain. No analytics, no tag manager, no font CDN, no consent banner to dismiss. Video is a poster and a button served from here. The player is only built if you press play.

The page follows your system's light or dark setting, and there is no toggle, because a publication is not an app and you already told your computer what you wanted.

Machines

There is an llms.txt at the root, generated at build from the same frontmatter the pages are, so it cannot drift. One of the five ventures, Click Coded, audits businesses on whether they tell AI assistants they exist and publishes the failures by name. Only 4 of 81 crisis hotlines pass. A site that sells that work and doesn't do it would score badly on its own checker.