colophon

This site began as an exact reconstruction of its predecessor, rebuilt module-by-module from a full capture of the original markup and stylesheets. It was then redesigned decision by decision, with each change grounded in published research on reading, comprehension, and media display, or, where controlled studies do not exist, in the codified standards of scientific publishing.

Each decision was made by rendering competing systems as working prototypes and comparing them on real content. A selection of the alternatives explored is shown throughout this page.

Legibility research places the comfortable line length for continuous reading at roughly 45 to 85 characters, with about 66 characters as the often-cited ideal.^[1] Body text is therefore set in a 520px text block of about 64 characters per line, held inside a wider 715px column that is reserved for media. The previous site set its body text in light grey at a 105-character measure; both choices measurably impair reading.^[1]

A meta-analysis of 88 experimental comparisons shows that content presented in meaningful chunks is retained and transferred better than a continuous stream, with lower cognitive load.^[2] Project pages are therefore divided into numbered sections, and vertical space follows a two-tier system: 72px between elements within a section, 216px between sections. The segmentation is visible in the spacing itself, without rules or boxes.

The spatial-contiguity effect, that people understand material better when related words and pictures are physically close, is the best-replicated finding in multimedia-learning research: a median effect size of d ≈ 1.10 across 22 experiments,^[3] independently confirmed at g = 0.63 across 58 comparisons.^[4] Captions therefore sit directly beneath their figure, bound at 13px, in one consistent style. Figures are numbered in page order, following the signalling principle^[3] and standard journal practice, where every figure must be referenced from the text.^[5]

No controlled study directly compares strategies for displaying mixed-ratio media, so this site adopts the standards of scientific publishing. Nature permits figures at exactly two widths and Science at three, never arbitrary sizes.^[6][7] Here media take one of two widths: photographs and wide strips run the full 715px column, while informational media (diagrams, screenshots, interfaces) sit at the 520px text width, in line with the prose they support.

Eye-tracking shows readers scrutinise information-carrying images and skip decorative ones,^[8] so informational media are never cropped and aspect ratios are always preserved. Unusually tall media are height-capped and displayed contained on a neutral ground, the equivalent of a journal's figure-height limit, which exists so a figure and its caption share one view.^[6]

Eye-tracking of alternating image and text layouts shows that unpredictable placement makes scanning measurably less efficient: readers stumble, fixating where they expect content and finding none.^[9] Every figure, caption, and paragraph on this site therefore shares one flush left axis. An earlier version of this design alternated tall images left and right; the evidence retired it.

Layout shift makes readers lose their place, and it is one of the few display qualities with an industry-standard measurable threshold: a cumulative layout shift of at most 0.1.^[10] Every image's dimensions are computed at build time and declared in the markup, so each silhouette is reserved before the file loads and the page never reflows.

Videos and embedded builds play in place immediately, muted, with controls available. Media is treated as content in the flow of the page, not as a gated destination.

Two typefaces with strict roles. Zen Kaku Gothic New (SIL Open Font License) is the reading voice: Light for the identity and titles, Medium for labels, Regular for text. IBM Plex Mono (OFL) is the instrument voice, and only ever speaks in labels and numbers: section numerals, figure marks, metadata, tags. Confining the second typeface to a single narrow role keeps hierarchy legible without decorative variety. All fonts are open-licence and self-hosted, so the site renders identically on every operating system.

A fully static site built with Astro. The only client JavaScript is the image lightbox and the small-screen menu, together a few kilobytes. Multi-image galleries are computed at build time as balanced columns that preserve every aspect ratio; no gallery library ships to the browser.