Colophon
Type
Archivo (Omnibus-Type), Black, for NEWMAN. It is a variable font with a width axis, so the name is set at whatever width lets the letters run edge to edge at the tallest size the screen allows: condensed on a laptop, wider on a phone where it breaks into NEW and MAN.
Source Serif 4 (Adobe) for reading. Its optical sizes give the large story sentence a finer display cut and keep small titles sturdy, with lower contrast than a Didone so long lines stay easy on the eyes.
Martian Mono (Evil Martians) only for dates, counts and the ASCII under the lens.
Dither
The clouds are 1-bit: every dot is ink or paper. They are dithered with Bill Atkinson's error diffusion, the method from the original Macintosh, which drops a quarter of the error and so keeps highlights open. The sky is laid out as a strip that repeats seamlessly (the photograph followed by its mirror image), dithered once in a short Python script, and drifts slowly through the letters of NEWMAN, about one pass every eighty seconds. With reduced motion it holds still. Each image file carries a note naming its source.
The cloud photograph was generated on Glif for this site. It is not a stock image.
The helix
Five strands, one per value, drawn on a canvas at full screen resolution. On the left they enter apart and drift toward the center. In the middle they twist as a regular cable, a little over one full turn, each crossing cut clean with a thin paper outline so you can see which strand passes over. On the right they run off in one parallel bundle. Each strand is flat color with a fine 1px print grain fixed to the page. The twist travels slowly to the right, about one turn every twenty seconds; with reduced motion it holds still.
The five colored lines at the top of the footer are an instrument: Karplus-Strong plucked strings tuned to an open C major chord, silent until you turn the sound on.
References
From Ben's Pinterest boards: the ribbon cover of General Dynamics' 1958 annual report; mid-century science annual reports; the arc diagram on Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report cover; Samson Leung's portfolio, for restrained cobalt text on white and dense dated lists; a sentence interleaved with small image chips; cobalt and sky-blue dither and ASCII studies.
Build
Built with Astro as static pages, with small inline scripts and canvas only where the technique needs it. Fonts load from Google Fonts. Content comes from data files in the repository, so new work appears without anyone redesigning a page.