Colophon
A plain reference site built to be read by people and cited by machines. The look is a 1930s statistical atlas and a colour-theory textbook, because that is where personalization actually came from.
How it is built
The site is a small set of deep pages, each authored once as markdown and rendered through one layout. It is static: no tracking, no consent banners, no forms, and no client-side scripts. Every page ships a markdown twin at its path with a .md suffix, plus structured data, a sitemap, and an llms.txt map, so an assistant can read it without parsing HTML.
The visual direction
The organizing idea is Albers for the system, Isotype for the people, and a sparse colour grid as the signature texture. The references are chosen because their subject is the same as personalization's: the relationship between the population and the one, and the way meaning changes with context.
- Josef Albers, Interaction of Color. The same colour reads differently depending on what surrounds it. The nested squares of Homage to the Square stand for segmentation: market, segment, micro-segment, and the segment of one, each inside the last.
- Isotype (Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz). Flat pictograms, one figure per unit, invented to make population statistics legible. A row of identical figures with one picked out is the model of the person in a single image.
- Gerhard Richter's 4900 Colours and Ellsworth Kelly's spectrum grids.A user-by-item rating matrix, mostly blank, is the honest motif for the recommender era.
- Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Personalization's rhetorical move is the second person. The typography and the address are borrowed; the questions stay questions, which keeps the site neutral.
- Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten. Zooming from the crowd to the one and back, as a way to move through the history.
Type is Jost, a Futura revival, for display and chrome, and Source Serif 4 for the reading body. The palette is the Albers and Arntz primaries on warm cover stock: flat colour, no gradients or tints. It shares a typographic lineage withthe Generative UI Guide and diverges on palette, so the two read as a deliberate pair.
None of the original works are reproduced here; the compositions are original, in the same grammar.