Colophon
How this is made
A Braun calculator that has just had its comeback. The discipline, grid and honesty come from Dieter Rams and Jony Ive. The energy, colour and collectability come from K-pop. The bridge is Teenage Engineering and Nothing.
01
Five principles
Minimalist, but
- 1Every section is a devicePanels, switches and readouts, like a Braun or Teenage Engineering object. The Council runs on a mixing desk, not a chat box.
- 2Each project has an eraEvery playground gets its own colour and sticker. The grid and the type never change.
- 3Things are collectableEach playground has a card. Flip it for the spec.
- 4One loud moment per pageOne flash of colour, one sticker. Everything else stays quiet.
- 5Honest statusA small label on everything: shipped, in flight, draft, fixture data.
02
Palette
Paper, ink, and one flash per page
Paper#F1EFEAThe ground. Warm, never pure white
Ink#141414Text, rules and every control
Braun grey#6A6964Secondary text. 4.8:1 on paper
Switch orange#FF5B14Home. The Braun switch
Cobalt#2340FFWork, and Readout
Acid#C9F23APlayground, and the Council
Bubblegum#FF7EC7Writing, and Reprice
Butter#FFD23FAbout
Eras are fills with ink on top, never text on paper. Cobalt is the one exception. No gradients, no purple, no glass.
03
Type
One family, one mono
Aa
Friday night 62%
Friday night 80%
Friday night 100%
Friday night 112%
Friday night 125%
DM MONO — THE TEXT PRINTED UNDER A SWITCH. 0123456789
04
Stack
Fast, mostly static
- Framework
- Astro, static HTML by default, with React islands only where something moves
- Type
- Archivo, variable width from 62% to 125%, and DM Mono. Self-hosted
- Motion
- CSS only. Native view transitions between pages. Reduced motion respected everywhere
- Council
- A small TypeScript package: Claude Haiku 4.5 members, a Claude Sonnet 5 chair, schema-validated packs, a sycophancy eval
- Content
- Markdown, written in my notes and published into the repo
- Tracking
- None. No cookies, no analytics scripts
- Made with
- Claude in the loop, for code and critique. Every word and number checked by me
05
References
Where the ideas came from
- Dieter Rams, ten principles for good design
- Jony Ive, on the parts you never see
- NewJeans and the logo that changes every release
- Teenage Engineering and Nothing, the bridge
- karpathy.ai, deliberately plain
- Simon Willison, for the colophon habit
- rauno.me, for the craft bar
Made by Pixie Dust Industries — the name I put on my own work.