Design system

Colophon

The tokens, marks, and motifs this site is built from, and how it's put together.

01

The four voices

Moss --accent
structure, primary actions
generous
Prussian --support
analytical, info, diagrams
occasional
Copper --spark
links, emphasis, the flash
small
Brass --heritage
ceremony, epigraphs
rarest

Surfaces stay warm paper, ink stays green-black – never pure white, never pure black.

02

Type specimens

Measuring twice
Spectral / display, headings
Jasper Kho
EB Garamond, small-caps / ceremony, the wordmark
Holding up, so far
Hanken Grotesk / body and UI
No. 042 / Jul 2026
DM Mono / eyebrows, metadata, figures
03

Components

04

The marks

JasperKho

The given name's "J" sits in Spectral at weight 600, copper – the one flash of colour in an otherwise quiet mark. The rest of the given name follows at a light 300 weight; the surname switches register entirely, set in EB Garamond small-caps, with its own copper "K". Two families, two weights, one mark.

JK.

The chop is a double rule – an outer border and an inset second border – around a small-caps "JK." in copper. Four brass ticks mark the corners, a printer's register mark rather than a decoration. It stands in for the wordmark wherever that would be too loud: the footer, small ceremony.

05

Motifs

06

How this site is made

Obsidian. Writing happens first, in a local Obsidian vault – essays, notes, and books as plain markdown files with frontmatter.

Publish gate. A file only leaves the vault once its frontmatter sets publish: true; everything else stays private, by default.

Astro build, on a Raspberry Pi. Published files are handed over from the vault piece by piece, through a drop-folder inbox – never a live sync – then built into this static site with Astro, on a Raspberry Pi.

Cloudflare Pages. The built output deploys to Cloudflare Pages, which serves it over HTTPS at the edge.