The Grid System A grid is not a constraint; it is a liberation. It allows the designer to place elements with confidence. In typography-as-soil, the grid ensures vertical-rhythm. It is the skeleton of the page. Without it, everything is just floating in the void. With it, every element has a relationship to every other element. See: modular-scale
The Grid System A grid is not a constraint; it is a liberation. It allows the designer to place elements with confidence. In typography-as-soil, the grid ensures vertical-rhythm. It is the skeleton of the page. Without it, everything is just floating in the void. With it, every element has a relationship to every other element. See: modular-scale
The Grid System A grid is not a constraint; it is a liberation. It allows the designer to place elements with confidence. In typography-as-soil, the grid ensures vertical-rhythm. It is the skeleton of the page. Without it, everything is just floating in the void. With it, every element has a relationship to every other element. See: modular-scale
Typography as Soil does it work? If content is the plant, typography is the soil. Poor soil yields weak plants. You can have the best content in the world, but if it is set in 12px Arial with no line-height, it will die. We rely on swiss-style for structure and humanist-type for warmth. Key elements: vertical-rhythm measure-and-leading modular-scale Without these, the reader fatigues. The nutrients of the text are lost in the friction of decoding. Reading is a physical act; the eye is a muscle. Treat it with respect.
Typography as Soil does it work? If content is the plant, typography is the soil. Poor soil yields weak plants. You can have the best content in the world, but if it is set in 12px Arial with no line-height, it will die. We rely on swiss-style for structure and humanist-type for warmth. Key elements: vertical-rhythm measure-and-leading modular-scale Without these, the reader fatigues. The nutrients of the text are lost in the friction of decoding. Reading is a physical act; the eye is a muscle. Treat it with respect.
Vertical Rhythm The baseline grid is the drumbeat. Every line of text, every image, every heading must align to it. When rhythm is broken, the reader feels it subconsciously. It feels "off," like a drummer missing a beat. It is a core tenet of typography-as-soil. We use 1rlh (one rhythmic line height) as our base unit.
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Typography as Soil If content is the plant, typography is the soil. Poor soil yields weak plants. You can have the best content in the world, but if it is set in 12px Arial with no line-height, it will die. We rely on swiss-style for structure and humanist-type for warmth. Key elements: vertical-rhythm measure-and-leading modular-scale Without these, the reader fatigues. The nutrients of the text are lost in the friction of decoding. Reading is a physical act; the eye is a muscle. Treat it with respect.
Typography as Soil If content is the plant, typography is the soil. Poor soil yields weak plants. You can have the best content in the world, but mif it is set in 12px Arial with no line-height, it will die. We rely on swiss-style for structure and humanist-type for warmth. Key elements: vertical-rhythm measure-and-leading modular-scale Without these, the reader fatigues. The nutrients of the text are lost in the friction of decoding. Reading is a physical act; the eye is a muscle. Treat it with respect.
Humanist Typography Based on the hand of the scribe. It has a ductile line and an organic axis. Unlike swiss-style which is geometric and constructed, Humanist type breathes. It mimics the movement of a broad-nib pen. It is the voice of perennial-notes. Examples: Garamond, Jenson, Bembo.
Link Rot Over 50% of links from 10 years ago are dead. This is a tragedy for digital-permanence. We fight link rot by creating self-contained archives and using cool-uris-dont-change. When you link to something, you are making a promise that it will be there. Do not break that promise.
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-vs-garden, which flows past you and disappears, a garden accrues value over time. The Philosophy of Soil We follow the slow-web philosophy: built to last, not to flash. When we cultivate a garden, we are not looking for the immediate dopamine hit of a "Like" or a "Retweet." We are looking for the slow, compounding interest of knowledge. "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." The...
Perennial Notes A term coined in the digital gardening community. These are notes that are revisited, watered, and pruned. They stand in contrast to daily logs or tweets. They connect to the garden-manifesto. A perennial note might start as a sentence, grow into a paragraph, and mature into an essay. See also: wabi-sabi-web
Modular Scale Music has intervals. Typography has scales. Common scales: Golden Ratio (1.618) Perfect Fourth (1.333) Major Third (1.250) This relates directly to the grid-system. We don't pick font sizes randomly; we pick a base note and multiply it.
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.
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.
Born in the cold functionality of post-war Europe, the International Typographic Style seeks to remove the designer's ego from the equation. It strives for objective clarity, using asymmetry and the grid to organize information without decoration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beneath the forest floor, fungi connect the trees, transferring nutrients and signals. In our garden, hyperlinks are the mycelium. They create a non-hierarchical network of knowledge that is stronger than any folder structure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A poetic ode to structure. Twelve columns standing, shoulder to shoulder, invisible brothers holding up the sky.
A recipe for patience in an instant world. Requires 3 days, flour, water, and faith. The ultimate analog to the perennial note—living, breathing, and fermenting.
A practical guide to tuning the Tillotson HR carburetor on a 1967 Ski-Doo Olympique. Focuses on low-speed mixture and pop-off pressure. Written in the Standard Technical temperament for maximum clarity in the workshop.
The secret is cold butter and vodka. Yes, vodka. It evaporates faster than water, leaving flaky layers without gluten development. A recipe told as a story.
A short poem about the longest night and the return of the light. Set in the Gallery temperament, giving the words massive room to breathe.
Implementing smooth client-side navigation in a static site using Astro's View Transitions API. A technical deep-dive into the "SPA-feel" for Multi-Page Apps.
Rasmus Andersson's masterpiece. A typeface designed specifically for computer screens, bridging the gap between grotesque and humanist. Why it became the default font for the modern web.
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This note has been featured as today's inspiration.