Designing a quiet blog

Most personal sites drift toward noise. A sidebar appears, then a newsletter box, then three kinds of buttons. Each addition is reasonable on its own, and together they bury the only thing that matters: the writing.

This site is an attempt to hold the line. Here are the rules I gave myself.

One column, one measure

Everything sits in a single column about 640 pixels wide. That is roughly 70 characters per line at this font size, which is where long-form text is easiest to read. Images are allowed to be a little wider than the text, because a photograph wants room in a way a paragraph does not.

Type does the work

There is one sans-serif for the interface and body copy, and a serif for the things that should feel a bit slower: excerpts in the feed, and headings inside a post. The contrast between them is the only decoration on the page.

Good typography is invisible until you remove it, and then nothing else works.

Color is a signal, not a theme

The orange shows up in exactly three places: link underlines, the highlight on the home page, and the focus ring. Categories get a tint each, but it is mixed with the background so it never competes with a cover image.

Images have a job

Every post has a cover. Not because covers are pretty, but because a list of titles with no images is hard to scan, and a list of images with no titles is hard to trust. The square thumbnails in the feed are cropped from the same cover, so I only have to think about one image per post.

What I left out

• No comments. Email me instead.
• No analytics scripts. Vercel’s server-side numbers are enough.
• No “related posts” widget. The category page does that job better.

If I ever want to add something, it has to replace something else. That constraint has kept the site quiet for a while now, and I expect it to keep working.