Colophon

This is my corner of the internet - part portfolio, part brain dump. The site has evolved over time, and now it shows both my work and, somewhat nervously, my thoughts. Here's everything I could say about how it came to life.

Insipiration

Because 99% of people look at colophons to see where ideas came from, here are the people (rather than site) that inspired this one.


Builders


Alain Passard

Alain Passard shows what happens when you master the basics, then dare to break them. While everyone was obsessing over meat, he turned vegetables into the star of fine dining.

Over the years, I've watched and read everything I could find about Alain Passard. What stuck with me was his idea of "removing the noise" - letting things breathe and removing the unnecessary.

Start with this video from 2011.


Key visuals

Design details

Typography

Using Finder by Black[Foundry] - a clean sans-serif built for interfaces. I worked with the team back in 2014, so it felt right to use their typeface here.

The serif is Illusion Serif from Steven Liu.


Grid

Kept the layout narrow and single-column to make reading comfortable. Simple borders guide you through the content - a vertical line to ground things, horizontal ones to break up sections. Nothing fancy, just timeless design, at least to me.


Colors

I kept things black and white after experimenting with colors. Tried beige backgrounds, purple and orange accents - none of them felt right for more than a day. The minimal palette lets the work speak for itself.

Technology

Astro

I've tried my share of static site generators, but Astro won me over. It's well-documented, actively maintained, and writing in it helps me better understand engineering constraints. Plus, the component system just makes sense.


Github/Vercel/Cloudflare

Everything lives on Github - code, images, all of it. Vercel handles deployment to Cloudflare. Simple setup, one less thing to worry about.


Analytics

Curious about who visits, I use Vercel Analytics to see where folks come from. Just the basics, keeping it anonymous and light.

© Winter 24