Typography as Soil
Typography as Soil
The Mycelium
The living network of public gardens.
Perennial Notes
Perennial Notes
Mycelium Network
Mycelium Network
Link Rot
Link Rot
Swiss Style
Swiss Style
Humanist Typography
Humanist Typography
The Garden Manifesto
A digital garden is not a blog. It is not a feed. It is a place where thoughts grow. Unlike a stream, which flows past you and disappears, a garden accrues value over time. We follow the slow-web philosophy: built to last, not to flash. This excerpt is intentionally long to test how the UI handles massive blocks of text in the preview card component.
Stream vs Garden
The Stream is a treadmill of content—fast, ephemeral, and designed to disappear. The Garden is a sanctuary—slow, cumulative, and designed to endure. One demands your attention now; the other rewards your attention later.
The Slow Web
In an age of infinite scrolling and dopamine loops, the Slow Web is an act of resistance. It is the deliberate choice to build digital spaces that respect human cognition, prioritize reading over skimming, and value permanence over virality.
The Grid System
A grid is not a prison; it is a map. By dividing space into mathematical units, we create a rhythm that the eye can follow subconsciously. It turns the chaos of whitespace into the structure of architecture.
Vertical Rhythm
The heartbeat of the page. Just as music relies on a consistent tempo, typography relies on a consistent baseline. When every line of text aligns to this invisible drumbeat, the page vibrates with a subtle, subconscious harmony.
Digital Permanence
The web is rotting. Over 50% of links from a decade ago are dead. We fight this entropy by building static, self-contained archives that don't rely on complex databases to exist. If the server dies, the files should survive.
Modular Scale
Music has intervals; typography has scales. By resizing text according to a fixed ratio (like the Golden Ratio 1.618), we ensure that every heading and paragraph feels harmoniously related to its neighbors.
Cool URIs Don't Change
Tim Berners-Lee famously said, "URIs don't change: people change them." A URL is a contract. When you change it, you break the web. We use clean, semantic slugs and persistent IDs to honor this contract.
Measure and Leading
The ergonomics of reading. Measure is the length of the line; leading is the space between them. Get these wrong, and reading becomes a chore. Get them right, and the text disappears, leaving only the idea.
The Zettelkasten Method
Niklas Luhmann's "slip-box" method. Instead of filing notes by topic, you link them by context. This turns a static archive into a dynamic conversation partner, revealing connections you never knew existed.
Helvetica Legacy
The perfume of the city. Helvetica is not just a font; it is the default setting of modernism. Neutral, objective, and ubiquitous, it tries to be the crystal goblet that holds the wine of content without coloring it.
Wabi-Sabi Web
The Japanese aesthetic of finding beauty in imperfection and impermanence. A digital garden is never "finished." It is always in a state of becoming. We embrace the broken link, the draft, and the work-in-progress.
Atomic Design
Brad Frost's methodology for thinking of UIs not as pages, but as systems. Atoms combine to form molecules, which form organisms. It is the industrialization of design, ensuring consistency at scale.
The Future of Text
In a world pivoting to video and voice, text remains the highest-bandwidth interface for complex thought. It is searchable, skimmable, and indexable. We are not moving away from text; we are moving toward better tools for thinking with it.