Back matter
Colophon
A book worth reading says how it was set. This site is built the way the writing argues software should be: simple, deliberate, and legible to whoever maintains it next.
- The mark
- The monogram is భ — the Telugu letter bha, the first sound of Bhanu — drawn from Noto Serif Telugu and embedded as a single vector path, so no Telugu webfont ever ships. It signs the masthead, the favicon, the end of every essay, and the foot of this page.
- Type
- Display settings are Fraunces, a soft serif with real optical sizes; running text is Newsreader, drawn for long-form reading on screens. JetBrains Mono appears only where monospace earns its keep: dates, numbers, and code. Body figures are oldstyle; code keeps lining figures.
- Color
- Paper ivory ground, warm ink text, and one accent — terracotta. The rule is simple: if something seems to need a second accent color, the design is wrong, not the palette. Structure is drawn with hairlines of diluted ink rather than boxes and shadows.
- Build
- Astro 6, server-rendered at the edge on Cloudflare Workers. Styling is Tailwind CSS v4 with tokens declared in CSS. Content is MDX validated by Zod schemas. The pages ship no JavaScript framework — the masthead condenses into its running header with CSS scroll-driven animation, and the one script on essay pages is a fifteen-line scroll-spy for the contents list.
- Posture
- Browsing is plain links and query strings, not client state. Filtering happens on the server. Essays carry their epistemic status, print cleanly, and end with an email address rather than a comment box. Complexity is added only when it improves clarity, discoverability, or accessibility — and it is expected to prove it.