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Colophon
How this site is made. The design is called Ground truth: in surveying, checking a map against what’s actually on the ground.
Type
- Archivo
- Display and interface. A variable width axis (62–125) gives condensed labels, wide capitals and the opening animation from one family. By Omnibus-Type.
- Newsreader
- Reading: case studies and notes. By Production Type.
- IBM Plex Mono
- Data only: coordinates, dates, depths, figure numbers.
All three are open-licensed and served from this site, not a font CDN.
Colour
Two themes named for where the work happens: Field by day, Lab at night. The accent is cinnabar, mercury’s ore, and it marks only what is live.
| Name | Role | Field | Lab |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datum | The page | #edede7 | #111311 |
| Bedrock | Text and marks | #1a1c19 | #e8e9e3 |
| Silt | Secondary text | #474a43 | #b1b4ab |
| Clay | Strata and figures | #9a7650 | #b8926a |
| Water | Hydrography only | #3c6878 | #86aebb |
| Cinnabar | Only what’s live | #d8431f | #ff6a45 |
Data and maps
The ground under the home page is California at 384 × 432, baked from public elevation tiles with the lakes marked; each project’s close-up is a further 40 km of real terrain around its site, baked at build time. Elevation: Mapzen Terrarium (SRTM, NED, GMTED). Boundary: Natural Earth via PublicaMundi. Lakes: Natural Earth. The strata in the cross-section are schematic; the land surface above them is real. Project positions are rounded to about a kilometre, or more where a project asks for it, before they reach any page, and every close-up is centred on that rounded position.
The map lettering follows USGS convention: water in italic serif, sites in semibold with a stake.
Build
Pages are rendered to static HTML with Astro and served by Cloudflare Pages. Public pages ship no framework JavaScript: the ground is hand-written WebGL2 that draws only while something is moving, and motion uses CSS scroll-driven animation and native view transitions. Every moment has a finished, still version for readers who prefer reduced motion.
A strict Content-Security-Policy covers every page. Nothing is embedded from a third party until you ask for it: videos load YouTube only after you press play.
The content is edited in a private Studio I built, which commits to the site’s repository. Photos are resized and stripped of location data in the browser before they’re uploaded.
Accessibility and privacy
Text meets WCAG AA contrast in both themes, everything works from the keyboard, and the site reads in order with a screen reader. If something doesn’t work for you, tell me.
No cookies, no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting.
Built 2026-10-05.