How this site works
01 Type
Three typefaces, down from four. I tried a Caslon, then a Garamond, and binbagged both. Neither sat right next to the sans. A story is not a reason, and neither is a nice specimen. Emphasis is the same face leaning over, never a second one brought in to do the job.
Schibsted Grotesk carries the prose.
built for a Scandinavian newsroom, reads like oneand it leans when a word matters.
its own true italic, not a second typeface pretending to be emphasisand the margin notes are an actual ballpoint
Reenie Beanie. the one red biro is a real biroسبحان الله
Amiri counts the dhikr. Revived from the Amiria Press in Cairo02 Colour
Warm paper, warm ink, one seal red spent like money. If everything is highlighted, nothing is. The only gold in the house shows up when you select text, so go on, select this sentence.
Dark mode is called after Maghrib in the stylesheet. The moon is the same sun with its rays folded away.
03 Motion
Three speeds, named like gears. Swift at 160ms for feedback, settle at 340ms for state, grand at 700ms for entrances. Everything decelerates like a real object. Nothing bounces except the tasbih bead.
Ask for reduced motion and the site sits still, including the race you just ran.
04 Small details
The clock is an homage to Bilal. It reads your timezone, works the prayer times out on your own machine and tells you what is next where you are, and inside half an hour it stops reporting the time and starts nudging you. Nothing is asked and nothing is sent. Press t for the tasbih, thirty-three to the ring, which is dhikry paying a visit. ⌘K opens the palette.
The favicon is a seal, س stamped in red. The margin notes draw themselves in as you reach them, ink first and words after, the way notes actually get written. Links underline in hairline ink and only commit to red when you hover.
05 Colophon
Fourteen pages on one stylesheet and one script, no framework. The venture pages write themselves from my own archive, so what reaches you is still static files. The fonts live here rather than on Google, subset down to the characters this site actually sets. Nothing asks another origin for anything, which rules out analytics.
The day job is Draper. That is writing, not websites.