Colophon
How this site is made.
Typeset rather than decorated, drawn rather than photographed, and served from one domain.
Type
Display and headings are set in STIX Two Text, a face designed for scientific and mathematical publishing. The Σ in the wordmark is native to it, not a decorated glyph. Prose is Instrument Sans; eyebrows, indices, and the fine print are Spline Sans Mono. All three are served from this domain. No type is loaded from a third party, and neither is anything else.
Past 1080 pixels, section labels move into a left margin, the way a printed paper carries its running heads. The measure does not stretch to fill the extra width; the width is spent on structure instead.
The marks
The emblem, a lion and trident rising from a wave that forms an S-curve, predates this site and carries on unchanged.
The Summation Mark on the front page is drawn rather than set: a Σ with lower bound i = human, which is the house’s thesis in three characters of mathematics. It is written by hand because the thesis is that you begin from the human, and a glyph is not written by anyone. The strokes are generated from a fixed seed at build time, so the hand is the same on every render and the mark still ships as inline SVG rather than as a picture.
The plates
The imagery on this site is generated, not photographed and not
bought. The plates are rendered from fixed seeds by a script in the
repository, scripts/generate-plates.py, so re-running it
reproduces them exactly and the repository stays diffable.
Each plate draws the idea it sits beside rather than decorating it. The plate below is the whole thesis: attention scatters, and one thing in the frame stays coherent enough to measure everything else against. Elsewhere, a machine trace learns to hold a measured distance from a human one; a grid is re-solved around where its nodes actually are; interference damps to stillness at a quiet centre.
Plates carry roman numerals and generated imagery. Figures carry arabic numerals and are drawn as inline SVG: the research cycle, the governance intersection, the programs against their axes, and the lineage. Keeping the two series apart means a caption can be cited without ambiguity, and every drawing has a text alternative that says what it shows.
Stack
Static-first pages built with Astro and hand-written CSS on a small token system; the Library and correspondence are served from a Postgres database at the edge. The whole site ships less JavaScript than most sites’ cookie banners, which is fitting, because it has no cookie banner: there are no cookies, no analytics, and no trackers to consent to.
The client portal is the one part that keeps state about a person, and it is described where it is governed: sessions are opaque tokens stored only as digests, and every state-changing action is recorded. See governance.
Left out, deliberately
- Stock photography.
- Generated imagery of people, faces, or places.
- Newsletter pop-ups and interstitials.
- Engagement metrics, analytics, and third-party scripts.
- Anything that would need a consent banner.
The site is typeset rather than “designed”. If the type system fails, the site fails, and that is the point. The plates are the one place imagery is allowed, and they are only allowed because each one is a drawing of an argument rather than a picture of a mood.