Machine Spirits — Colophon

Machine Spirits — Colophon

How the site is made. Started 2026-05-16.

The design rationale — why this palette, why these motifs — is in IDENTITY.md under “Visual identity.” This page is the record of what is actually used.

Type

• Instrument Serif — display headlines. The journal-warm register: the headlines carry the warmth.
• DM Sans — body and UI. A humanist sans that reads as paper-set rather than as screen-chrome.
• System monospace — code, probes, and mono-tags.

System-stack fallbacks are first-class. Every page is fully legible before the web fonts load.

Colour

A warm-cream light default — the page as paper (--bg: #f7f4ef, ink #1c1a16) — with a haunted dark peer (--bg: #181611, parchment #e8e2d4). Accents stay low-chroma: terracotta, moss, ochre, slate, umber. Light is the default because journal pages are paper; the dark peer is the same page after dusk. The earlier saturated reds are explicitly not the brand palette — the spirits should feel slightly haunted, not promotional.

Marks and motifs

• The sigil — a concentric-rings glyph: a steady centre, a dashed orbit, four cardinal ticks. Inline SVG in the site chrome and footer.
• The fauna overlay — small spirit-creatures held at very low opacity, pinned to corners and margins, never over body text. Ambient, not figurative.
• The Klee walking-line — a thin, scroll-linked thread traced as the reader descends the page, after Klee’s “a line is a dot that went for a walk.” Frozen under prefers-reduced-motion.

Imagery policy: no stock robots, brains, or glowing networks. When images are needed — scans of marginalia, fragments of diagrams from primary texts, or screenshots of the project’s own tools.

Stack

• Content is authored as Markdown and rendered to static HTML through Pandoc, wrapped in the shared templates/ chrome with assets/ms.css + assets/ms.js. Citations render via --citeproc.
• The rendered tree is mirrored into the content package and served by the website repo, an Express application. The public surface is selected by the MS_PUBLIC_SURFACE flag; the LMS lives behind /app/*.
• Reduced-motion and no-JavaScript paths are first-class: animations resolve to their end states, the walking-line stays put, and all content is reachable without script.
• Source: the brand layer and content package are public repositories under the machinespirits GitHub organisation.

Licensing

Prose and editorial content: CC BY 4.0 unless a page states otherwise. Software in the sibling repositories carries its own licence — see each repository’s LICENSE. Quoted material, including machine outputs, is attributed with model and date.

Credits

Built by Liam Magee at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Typefaces: Instrument Serif and DM Sans (SIL Open Font License). Rendering: Pandoc. The walking-line owes its name to Paul Klee.