How this site is set
A colophon is the note at the end of a book saying how it was made. It would be poor form for a typesetter not to publish her own.
The name is a colophon too. A versal is the large initial at the start of a text, painted in red by hand after the black had been printed. Every essay here opens with one.
- Measure
- About 66 characters, stated in ch so it survives a reader enlarging the type. The argument is in the essay on the measure.
- Text face
- Literata, variable, with the optical-size axis in use: the headlines and the body text are not the same drawing. Self-hosted, SIL Open Font License.
- Second face
- Albert Sans, variable, self-hosted, SIL Open Font License. Dates, bylines, labels and buttons only. Two families and no third.
- Body size
- 19 pixels at a line height of 1.72 in essays; the drop cap is 4.6 lines of that.
- Paper
- A warm off-white, #fbf8f3. Ink is #1a1714, at 16.9 to 1 against it.
- Rubric
- One accent, a vermilion #b3261e at 6.2 to 1. It paints the versal, the series names and the buttons, and nothing else.
- Photographs
- From photographers on Pexels, credited in full in the licence file. No faces, no brands.
- Trackers
- None. No analytics script, no font request to anyone else’s server, no embedded anything.