Colophon

The position

Design is increasingly generated, and the hand is no longer the bottleneck — the sentence is. A model can produce thirty layouts in a minute; choosing among them, and saying what is wrong with the other twenty-nine, still takes words. Wording exists to sharpen those words. If you can’t name it, you can’t direct it.

The system

The site tries to behave like what it teaches.

Still — a dictionary about motion that never moves. No transitions, no entrances, nothing eased. Stillness is the discipline the subject deserves.

Monochrome, plus one — black, white, and International Klein Blue, #002FA8, lifted a step lighter in the dark. In every figure the blue is spent on exactly the thing the term names: the recovered kern, the excursion past the target, the empty space that works. The blue is the word.

A dictionary, properly — guide words in the page corners, a folio where one belongs, and an alphabet you can leaf through with the arrow keys.

The type

Text is set in Newsreader, a serif by Production Type drawn for screens with the manners of print. Labels, captions, and folios are DM Mono, by Colophon Foundry — a fitting name to land on this page.

Influences

Wording stands on writing better than its own.

• Emil Kowalski’s writing on motion — the clearest case that animation is judgment, not garnish.
• Rauno Freiberg’s craft notes — proof that the invisible details are the design.
• Design Engineering at Vercel — the discipline this dictionary hands words to.
• Dieter Rams’ ten principles — “less, but better” is this site’s editorial policy.
• Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style — the book every type term here is afraid of disappointing.

The making

Built on Next.js and set entirely in HTML, CSS, and hand-computed SVG; every page is static. Each entry is one MDX file; each figure is drawn at build time from real curves — a damped oscillator, a back-ease, a hue angle. There is no animation library to refuse. The source is one folder of words.