Colophon.
Books used to end with a note on how they were made — the type, the paper, the press. We build digital things for a living, so here is ours.
The faces
Headlines are set in Newsreader, an open-licence face with a true optical axis — it grows more delicate as it grows larger, which is why the hero’s italic keeps its hairlines. Body matter is EB Garamond; the small annotations — plate captions, section marks, the figures in the estimator — are IBM Plex Mono, the surveyor’s hand to Garamond’s letterpress.
The fonts are served from this site, not a font network. Before they arrive, the page paints in Georgia wearing each face’s exact metrics — measured in the rendering engine, style by style — so when the real type lands, nothing moves. The first paint is the finished layout.
The plan
The drawing on the front page is the Circus, after John Wood the Elder’s plan of 1754, drawn live in the page as vector linework — construction circle first, axes struck, then the three terraces inked in build order. On a fine pointer it answers the survey conventions: a crosshair with a graticule, and a PROJ. control that raises the plan into the military projection an eighteenth-century draughtsman would recognise. If your system prefers reduced motion, the plan is simply there, complete.
The paper
The palette is called Ink & Stone: Bath limestone for the sheet, a purple-navy ink for the words, one claret accent spent sparingly. A fine grain is baked into the paper at low alpha — enough tooth to feel, never enough to read. The dark theme is not an inversion; it is the same page reprinted in the other ink, with its own measured contrast. Photographs are printed as duotone plates so they sit in the ink rather than on top of it.
The print edition
Print the front page and you do not get a screen layout squeezed onto A4 — the page stands down and a four-page journal takes the paper, set for print from the start. Try it with ⌘P, or take the copy we cut:
Take a copy — the print edition (PDF, 1 MB)Nothing watching
No cookies. No analytics. No trackers. Every request this page makes goes to this site and nowhere else — the fonts, the images, all of it, first-party. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
If you pin a theme, that choice is kept in a single key on your own device; set it back to auto and even that is erased. An enquiry goes to our form host and our inbox, and is used to reply to you — nothing more.
The press
The site is built statically with Astro and served flat — no database, no application server waiting to fall over. The styles travel inside the page, so the whole front sheet, journal and all, arrives as one compressed document of about thirty-six kilobytes. Scripts run only if they match a fingerprint taken of them at build time; the connection is pinned to HTTPS for the next year by policy, not habit. A small service worker keeps the last copy you read, so the sheet still opens on the train.
This page is the sort of care we bring to work that is not ours. If that appeals, start a conversation.