The colophon · How the site is set

Colophon

A catalogue says what it is made of. The values below are the ones the site actually runs on, taken from the code rather than described around it.

The mark: ∫ > Σ. The integral held above the sum: what a body of work becomes together, set over what it amounts to counted separately. One unbroken stroke, a bronze chevron at the middle, the sigma kept quieter. It is the tab icon and the argument, and it is the only thing the opening frame says.
The type: One family across three weights, doing the work a full system usually does. 200 carries every headline, 400 the running text, 500 the plaques, and nothing crosses. Text is set at 18px over 1.75, measured to 52 characters. Capitals are tracked 0.16em and take the face’s case-sensitive forms, so the middot between the parts of a plaque sits at the optical centre of the capitals rather than on the x-height of lowercase that is not there.
The figures: Proportional, because the face carries no tabular set and no browser invents one. Nothing here is set in a column that would need them: the clock ends its line, the ledger’s ghost numeral is anchored on its right edge, and the figures in the margin are single lines already flush. Stated because a colophon that only lists what went well is an advertisement.
The companion hand: Noto Sans Bengali, self-hosted and bound to the Bengali range, so Latin never touches it and the browser fetches it only when Bangla actually renders. Monolinear like the grotesque beside it. One voice, two hands.
The numerals: Two systems, two jobs. Bengali numerals carry position in the record: ০৯ is the ninth thing made, and it was made in Dhaka. Latin numerals carry quantity: 19 signage projects, 23 percent, 61 percent, figures that belong to the reader and travel without him. The rule is written here and nowhere else on the site.
The colour: Defined in OKLCH. The ground is not a set of themed sections but a continuous mix between oklch(14% 0.006 75) and oklch(95.5% 0.011 85), driven by reading position. Ink runs the same way, between oklch(93% 0.012 85) and oklch(16% 0.008 75). One accent exists, a burnished bronze at oklch(76% 0.075 84), and it is spent fewer than eight times on a page. There is no other hue. Photographs are graded to monochrome in the stylesheet, never in the file.
The light: The house keeps Dhaka time. Four settings, dawn, day, dusk and night, follow the real position of the sun over 23.8103 north, 90.4125 east, computed on the page by the Almanac method. No service is called; it is astronomy, not data. Between one setting and the next, lightness moves at most 1.5 points, hue at most 8 degrees, chroma at most 0.02. The same room, an hour later. A change that falls while you are reading crosses over sixty seconds, which is slower than noticing.
The weather: The washes are laid a few degrees off horizontal, the way a sky is. Their colour stops are sampled from smootherstep rather than set by hand, because a straight ramp changes slope at every stop and the eye draws a line where the slope changes even when there is no edge to find. Each wash is then faded to nothing on all four sides, and passed through a filter that wanders the contour, wicks it into the fibre, and lets the stroke break only at middle densities. The test it has to pass is that nothing in it can be isolated and named.
The motion: One curve, cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1). Two durations, 0.9s for an arrival and 0.3s for a change of state. Nothing enters from offscreen and nothing grows from smaller than itself; things are uncovered. While the reader moves, the prints sit at a working state and develop when the reader stops, so stillness is the only thing that finishes them. Scroll position is the easing, and the whole engine is one pass per frame. All of it is off when the reader has asked for less motion.
The plates: AVIF, with WebP behind it for anything that cannot read AVIF, at quality 90. The usual default of 75 steps visibly in the darks, and this site is mostly darks. Each photograph is served at the width its slot actually needs.
The sheet: Printed, a case becomes a catalogue sheet: page margins, no page chrome, marginalia returned to the flow, captions kept with their plates, external addresses written out in full. The site is built to be read on paper as well as on glass, because the people it is written for still print.
The making: Next.js on the App Router, content in Sanity, served from Vercel. Every font is self-hosted; not one byte of type is fetched from another domain. No radius, no shadow.
Amended: 28 July 2026

All of it can be checked against the code. That is the reason for writing it down.