Design System

The site commits to one accent. Everything else is a near-black surface or a white/foreground opacity ramp. Which is why a project's own colour never reaches text anywhere, and why the project-card kind line uses the site cyan rather than the per-project hue: doing otherwise put red, violet and purple side by side on a page whose whole argument is restraint.

Depth on a near-black page cannot come from drop shadows. A shadow needs something lighter than itself to fall onto, and the body panel is already #0B0B0B. So cards are the same value as or darker than the surface behind them, and the depth cue is the lit top edge (an inset white hairline) instead.

Three colour tokens and two font tokens; everything else is derived from them through opacity. The ramps matter more than the hexes: opacity is the only thing ranking text on this site, so the levels have to run in the order the reader should follow.

That order was once inverted, and it is the reason the ramp is written down: Prose sat at 65 (dimmer than the bullet lists and boxes leaning on it. So a scan of the page surfaced the scaffolding and buried the reasoning.

Two voices, and the split is strict. Satoshi is what you read. Display, headings, body, quotes. Montserrat is the furniture. Labels, nav, footer, anything naming a thing rather than saying it.

The label system is one component, MiniHeading, and that is a consolidation rather than a preference: the site once had fourteen distinct Montserrat label styles (eight trackings, four sizes, four weights. Of which two covered 32 of 53 uses and the other twelve were improvised on the spot. Those two became label and micro. A rule that lives in a doc loses to whatever is quickest to type, so every non-interactive label goes through the component and the rule enforces itself.

lead (16px) was added later, on purpose and against the two-sizes rule: at 11px the words naming the Learnings, Challenge and Impact cards were the smallest type on the page, and those are the three panels a recruiter reads last and remembers. 16 is not a new number. It is the body step the site already had. 18 was built first and rejected as too loud.

Four steps of vertical rhythm, and only four. Each roughly doubles the last, which is what makes them read as levels rather than noise. Before this the page used eleven values between 0 and 64, and the two commonest (24 and 32) were close enough to be the same gap under two names.

The number that mattered is 28. Body copy is 16px on a 26px line, and paragraphs were 16px apart, 0.62 of a line, so the space between paragraphs was tighter than the space between lines inside them, and the eye had nothing telling it where one idea ended. Bullets were worse at 0.33. A paragraph gap must be at least one line; that is the whole rule, and it is why the step is 28 and not 24.

Radii are the same kind of decision. Square is the platform: Home, About and the deck contain zero rounded corners. The case studies spent a while at 12px, which made them the only rounded surfaces on the site. A live audit found 43 elements at 4px, 10 pills, and six at 12px, exactly as the comment warned. Writing a rule down is not applying it.

One sentence cut at the full stop: the setup recedes to foreground/45, the payoff lands at full strength. The sentence dims and then lights up as you read it, so the contrast carries the meaning and no extra structure has to.

It exists to avoid a two-column grid. Subscriptions UI has already used the ProblemPair box six times by the time you reach its Impact line; saying the same before/after in one line of type, with tone doing the work, is a different instrument for the same job.

What recedes must be CONTEXT, never DATA. That is the rule the device shares with ProblemPair, which deliberately does NOT tone its two halves: it splits one continuous unit, so value carries the whole contrast. Dimming half of a card that is already separated by a border reads as the card being disabled instead.

There are only four colour tokens and two font tokens in this system, and that is not an omission. It is the point. What would be a token elsewhere is a recipe repeated verbatim here: the lit top edge appears 13 times across 6 files as the same string, because it is the one depth cue that survives on a near-black page.

A drop shadow does very little here: it needs something lighter than itself to fall onto, and the body panel is #0B0B0B. So the shadows below are mostly family resemblance rather than depth. The real work is done by the fill, the hairline and the lit edge.

One speed per gesture, everywhere it appears. Background lines all draw at 3000ms, verticals and horizontals alike. They ran at 1600 and 3000 until 13 Sep 2026, on the argument that a horizontal crosses the reading axis and needed longer; the split held only while the two never appeared together. The About's foot draws both at once, and at two speeds the frame arrived in two pieces.

Every animation respects prefers-reduced-motion, and the trade is always the same: keep the information, drop the travel. The card trace still shows its drawn edge, the marquee still shows its list. They just arrive instead of moving.

The site's standard call to action, and the origin of the gesture the other buttons borrow: the button widens on hover rather than changing colour, and a trailing icon arrives into the space that opens.

Its focus treatment is a documented pair, not a duplicate: the border brightening from white/20 to white/45 is only ~2.7:1 against the resting state, under the 3:1 that WCAG 2.4.13 asks of a focus indicator. So it cannot be the whole story, and a real accent outline rides along with it.

A box built out of lines, black-filled, that only exists once the lines close it. It was extracted from TraceCta so the Contact section's three buttons are the same object rather than a lookalike. One component, one set of timings, one hover gesture.

The near edges bifurcate rather than switching on: each grows from its own centre, up-half from the bottom and down-half from the top, which is what makes an arriving line read as splitting instead of a border appearing.

The three leaves of a drawn decision tree: one line enters the section from above, runs down, goes dark behind the heading and paragraph, re-emerges below them and forks into three. One branch per way of getting in touch. It replaced a static 24px stub that sat there doing decoration; this is the same gesture, given a job.

Medium was the third leaf until it was found pointing at a profile with nothing posted since 2019. A dead end on the one row of the site whose whole job is to be acted on. The résumé took its place.

The editorial project card, shared by Selected work on Home and Other projects at the foot of every case study. Deliberately not a box: typography does the work, and hover traces a single white line around the card's left and bottom edges that resolves into an arrow head.

The kind line is the site cyan and not the project's own accent. It used to take the per-project colour, which put red, violet and purple side by side in the last viewport of every case study. Cyan rather than foreground/55 because “View case study” at the foot of the same card is already 55% at this exact size and tracking. Matching it would make the card open and close on two identical-looking labels.

Testimonials as a dealt pile, one card per scroll beat. The carousel this replaced hid two thirds of the content behind arrows nobody clicks. Each card is thrown in from the side it settles toward, overlapping the one before it.

The sizes inside it are a ranking, arrived at by measurement. The portrait was once 192px of a 421px card (46%) while the quote it illustrated was 118px (28%). The picture of the person was bigger than what the person said. It overshot to 112 next, at which point the decorative quote glyph became the largest thing in the card at 1.5x the face. The order the card now states, largest first, is person, then quote, then ornament.

It is deliberately not a button. The lift conveys no information. The quote is fully readable either way, and nothing expands or navigates. It carried role="button" and aria-expanded for a while, which announced “…227 characters of quote…, button, collapsed” and then did nothing when activated.

The nav speaks the site's label voice, 14px Montserrat, uppercase, 0.14em. It was the last piece of furniture still in sentence case with no tracking, which put it at odds with everything doing the same job: the case-study rail, the step markers, the BeforeAfter switch, and the resume box sitting 3cm to its right in the very same bar.

The active mark is one element that never unmounts, moved by hand. It was a framer layoutId and had to come out: the header is sticky, so its viewport box never moves, but framer's layout projection records page boxes. Navigating from a scrolled page recorded the outgoing mark at 69.6 + scrollY and measured the incoming one at 69.6. So the mark flew in diagonally from far below.

The cyan text-glow is gone. It was removed from the rail's active marker at the user's request, and an idiom rejected there should not survive here. So what marks the active link is what marks the active step in the rail: an accent bar.

The numbered section label on Home and About, “01 / Selected work”. It used to carry its own voice (11px / 0.35em / 400), the last survivor of the pre-consolidation label zoo: at 11px with a third of an em of tracking it read as legal print, and it named the biggest sections on the site.

It now delegates to MiniHeading's label size, so a section label on Home and a step marker inside a case study are literally the same style rather than two things that merely rhyme. It stays its own component because the name says what the thing IS at those seven call sites. And if the eyebrow ever wants to diverge again, this is where that decision goes.

The filled-card family: black fill, white/10 hairline, and the lit top edge that is the only depth cue that survives on a near-black page. A lit edge reads as a made object rather than a drawn rectangle; a drop shadow does not, because it needs something lighter than itself to fall onto.

Each one exists to rank a specific kind of content. WhyBox is a conclusion in a box, so its body sits one step above Prose and clearly below Statement. ProblemPair keeps both bodies at the same tone on purpose: dimming the problem was tried and reverted, because what gets de-emphasised must be context, never data. And the problem statement is data the reader needs to understand the solution beside it.

A card split in two: an argument on the left, the evidence for it on the right, with the screen running to the card's own edges. One component used by two case studies, and that is the point of it. Subscriptions UI's late requirements and Map Implementation's benchmark patterns are the same object, and they were two hand-built lookalikes that had already drifted apart in padding, alignment and how the image was treated.

The card is a floor, not a fixed height. At a fixed height it clipped copy: the version before this one swallowed 77px of a late requirement with no sign that it had. 348px is two thirds of the 520 it started at, and dropping the small index label from the text column is what made that realistic. It was ~46px spent on a number the ghost behind it already says.

A research session as an editorial three-column spread: hairline-separated columns, each carrying its figure at display size with a giant faint echo of that same figure behind it.

It replaces a StatRow. The same icon-tile card used four other times on the page. The numbers here are the evidence that the testing actually happened, and as one more row of chrome they read as decoration.

The ghost repeats what the column says, and ghost is its own prop rather than derived from position: a blanket 01/02/03 index was built first and dropped, because it put a second, larger number beside the real one and the eye read the wrong one. Pass an index only when the column has no figure of its own.

Every figure is click-to-enlarge, by default rather than per call. A reader should not have to discover which images happen to open; if some do and some do not, the ones that do not read as broken.

The hero size is not a fourth step on the same ladder. It leaves the ladder. sm/md/lg are caps inside the 48rem reading column, which is why every product screen measured 688–707px however large its source was: a 2931×3807 export rendered at 707, a 4.1× reduction, under a line calling it the complete flow ready for handover. On a portfolio whose argument is that the execution is the proof, the largest image on the page was the decorative cover backdrop. Aria-hidden, 40% opacity, unreadable by design.

A research finding as a headline, its supporting detail, the participant's own words, and what the team decided to do about it, the four parts of a finding kept as four parts rather than flattened into one grey paragraph.

The quote and the ideas are a pair (the evidence and the decision it forced. So they are the same object: same padding, same size, same grey, same label voice. Told as an italic pull-quote above a bulleted list they stopped reading as one thought.

The three cells carry the page's trio of fills in order, black to #0A0A0A to #141414, so the block lightens as it moves from what happened to what to do about it. No shadows: the cells touch, so a relief would fall onto the cell below rather than onto the page.

The case-study section wrapper: the step marker, the oversized ghost watermark, the heading, and 224px of padding above it.

Its one subtlety is the first-child override. The first block after a heading drops one step of the rhythm, 56 → 28, because a heading has to sit closer to the text it introduces than to anything else on the page. At the full block gap it floated between its own section and the one above. It is done by position ([&>*:first-child]:mt-7) rather than by giving Prose a smaller margin, because the tightening belongs to the position: the same Prose two blocks down still wants its 56.

Three components whose props are a choice rather than content, and all three share a problem: the wrong pick is invisible in isolation and obvious in comparison.

MiniHeading's nine size × tone combinations each look reasonable alone. Statement's variant is decided by a grammar test nobody remembers under deadline. And TraceButton's two draw directions cannot be compared at all unless you can replay them on demand.

Every number in this section is counted from the source at build time, not written down by hand. Which is the entire point of it.

This codebase keeps its rules in docblocks, and the recurring failure those docblocks describe is always the same shape: the rule was written down and then not applied. The StatRow comment says it outright. A live audit found six cards still at 12px radius, the only rounded surfaces left on the platform, eighteen lines under a sentence in bold saying they must not be. Writing a rule down is not applying it.

So this reads the tree and reports what is actually there. Add a seventh grey or a fifth opacity level and the page says so on the next load, instead of continuing to describe a system that no longer exists. The reference page excludes itself from the scan. Otherwise it would be reading its own homework.