Colophon

How this site is made: a falcon engraved in 1797, rigged and inked by code; three faces with one job each; four steps of bone and one red; and the commit this copy was printed from.

01The falcon

Rigged from an engraving

The falcon is Thomas Bewick’s, from A History of British Birds, 1797. On every page it is that drawing, cut into a rig: a body bent frame by frame, two wings built bone by bone and feather by feather, every feather engraved in the browser and inked in WebGL 2.

The two plates below are not pictures of it. They are its geometry, printed: the same functions that fly the bird on this page drew them when the site was built.

Fig. 2 The right wing as the code builds it, laid flat: drawn at build time from the rig the live bird flies with.Athree bones — the arm, the forearm and the hand — and everything else hangs from them; Bten primaries on the hand, the ninth the longest, as in a peregrine; Ctwelve secondaries along the forearm; Dthree tertials, closing the gap to the body; Ethe coverts, shingled in rows over the roots of the rest; Fthe alula, on the thumb.

Thomas Bewick's wood engraving of a peregrine falcon standing on a rock. — **Fig. 1** Peregrine falcon, Thomas Bewick, 1797: the drawing the rig is cut from.

Fig. 3 One wingbeat at eight instants, after Marey’s chronophotographs: the wing seen from behind, from the beat the live bird flies.Athe downstroke, loaded, the wing held fully out; Bthe upstroke, the wrist flexed and the hand swept back; Cthe path the wingtip runs through one beat.

Bones: 3: arm, forearm, hand
Primaries: 10
Secondaries: 12
Tertials: 3
Feathers seen from above: 86, each a card in 3-D

02The type

Three faces, one job each

Newsreader
The voice: the name, every heading, the statements and the figures. One weight; its optical size follows the size it is set at.
Motasem AbuBaraka — and keep it running.
IBM Plex Sans
The text: reading, labels, the interface. Two weights, sentence case, never tracked capitals.
I build software whole — the interface, the API and the data underneath — and keep it running after it ships.
IBM Plex Mono
The machine, and only the machine: code, wire formats, file names, versions.
port.onDisconnect.addListener(() => abort.abort());

03The colour

Four steps of bone, one red

A printed sheet turned negative: black paper, bone ink, and the vermilion a scribe kept for numerals and marks. Every colour that carries type clears WCAG AA on the page, and the suite fails the build if one stops. The ratios are worked out from the tokens as this page is built.

fgthe voice, and what is read first#e9e3d615.48 : 1
fg-mutedbody copy#ada6998.19 : 1
fg-subtlelabels, captions, the apparatus#978f826.19 : 1
fg-faintthe smallest metadata#8a83775.27 : 1
rubricnumerals, marks, the point of a plate#e4553f5.35 : 1

04The edition

Printed from a commit

Every page ends on a title block, the way every sheet of an engineering drawing does: who drew it, what it is set in, whose engraving it carries, which revision it is, and which sheet of the set.

This copy was printed from commit 26618ab on 5 October 2026. It is written in TypeScript on Next.js and React, the falcon in WebGL 2, and a suite of tests stands between every change and the press.

The software it shows is drawn the same way, as plates: a general arrangement of each product on the works, and a plate of each mechanism in the essays that explain them.