Colophon
This site is written in HTML with CSS and delivered using Hugo.
Claude assisted me in producing the website–both with refining design and getting Hugo piping up and running.
The website is set in Crimson and relies on Cormorant for headings.
For a comprehensive overview of this website’s elements, check out the style guide.
Site Principles
This website takes seriously that the World Wide Web was not designed to be a network of applications but a network of documents. As a result, the primary activity that visitors will engage in is reading.
Nevertheless, it also takes seriously the prospect that the internet might be beautiful. Rather than relying on an image, the index page’s hero was written entirely in CSS. Moreover, the internet provides something that traditional print media doesn’t: interactivity. As a result, the website’s theme changes throughout the course of each day. Altogether, there are six different themes, each corresponding to the time of day.
This website is responsive: it should be as pleasant to read on mobile as it is on desktop. Items that are organized horizontally on desktop become vertical on mobile. Moreover, the figures in the hero scene on the home page are trimmed down while on mobile.
This website is also accessible. All elements of the website include ARIA attributes, ensuring that they’re readable on screen readers and other devices.
Digital Gardening
Inspiration
The design of the website was inspired by the artwork of Giorgio di Chirico, an early 20th century Italian painter who acted–in many ways–as a forerunner to the surrealists. He called his artwork pittura metafisica: metaphysical painting. He was heavily influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and his paintings depicted northern Italian cities while juxtaposed the classical past with industrial modernity. His paintings can best be recognized through long shadows; bright, warm sun-baked colors; and hollow emptiness. When looking at one of his paintings, it’s all but impossible to shrug off the confrontation with the uncanny.
The hero scene on the home page is explicitly based on his work, and the colors found throughout are inspired by him. His paintings were at their finest when depicting afternoons and late evenings: if you’d like to see it here, stop by between 2:00 pm and 9:00 pm–that’s di Chirico at his best.
In honor of his work, I’ve named the theme of the website “metafisica.”
Rather than frame my digital garden as a “garden”–as Maggie Appleton and many others have, I continued with a metaphor that I think di Chirico would have been satisfied with: architecture. Di Chirico died in Rome, after having moved there at 60 years old. As we all know, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Neither were the ideas put out on this website. They emerged over periods of long deliberation, discussion, reading, and–quite often–incubation.
Compliance
This website is compliant with the following web standards: