How this site is made.

This site follows the same three ideas we bring to everything else: meaning, structure, and clarity. It seemed only right to hold the studio’s own pages to the standard we set elsewhere.

It is set in Instrument Sans, a typeface drawn for screens. We serve the font ourselves rather than leaning on whatever happens to be installed, so the page looks the same on Windows, a Mac, or a phone. Helvetica Neue stands in for the moment it takes to load. We hold to one or two sizes per page and let the spacing do the rest.

Everything sits on a grid of twelve columns. The margins are tight at the edges and looser within, a small tension borrowed from print. The horizontal rules do real work, dividing one section from the next rather than ornamenting the page.

The palette is black on a warm off-white, with a single red. The red always carries meaning, marking a link or drawing the eye to something. It never appears merely to fill space.

The pages are hand-written HTML served as static files, with a single function behind the contact form. That is the whole of it. The site loads immediately and should keep working for years with little attention.

The look owes a great deal to a particular strain of mid-century modernist design, which held that a grid and one good typeface can carry almost anything. We have tried to do it justice.