2026
This site
A personal site with two deliberate visual registers — a playful portfolio and an austere reading experience.
- Astro
- TypeScript
The site you are reading. It is deliberately two things at once, and the seam is on purpose.
Two registers
The portfolio — home and this page — is playful: colour, cards, a timeline. The blog is austere: a 780px measure, an old-style serif for headings, near monochrome, no ornament. The navigation boundary is the signal that the register has changed.
Splitting them was the riskiest decision in the build. Done carelessly it reads as inconsistency; the mitigation is that the shift is total and simultaneous — the top stripe thins, the measure narrows, the colour drains — so it reads as a door rather than a mistake.
Constraints
- No web fonts. Zero font bytes. Every face is a system stack, so there is no layout shift and nothing to download.
- No JavaScript. Not “a little” — the only script on any page is a ~300-byte inline snippet that prevents a flash of the wrong theme.
- Publishing is
git push. No dashboard, no CMS, no build step to remember.
What I would do differently
Decide what the site is for before choosing the stack. This one was designed around interactive essays, picked up a UI framework to support them, and then dropped the essays — leaving a build that was heavier than the site needed. The framework came back out. Deciding first would have been cheaper than deciding twice.