The living network of public gardens.
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.