Four knobs and a cream page

I put off starting this journal for two years, and the reason was always the same: I did not want to spend a weekend picking a typeface. I have watched that weekend turn into a month. The shelves never get built because the site about the shelves is not done.

So the deal I made with myself was that the look of this thing would be decided in one sitting, from a fixed menu, and then never revisited. Overprint made that easy, because there are exactly four knobs. Here is the whole of it, sitting in overprint.yml:

theme:
  mode: light
  accent: "#C2410C"
  font: sans
  background: "#F5EBDC"

That is the entire visual specification of this site. Four lines.

mode is light or dark. It decides the family of decisions everything else inherits: text color, surface color, how borders are drawn, whether the page reads as paper or as a screen at night. I picked light because I read long entries in the afternoon with the shop door open, and dark text on a pale ground survives that better.

accent is a hex color, and it is the only saturated thing on the page. It tints post titles and links. That is it. I spent about ten minutes here, which is nine minutes more than I had budgeted, and landed on #C2410C. It is roughly the color shellac goes over cherry after four coats, which is a thing I look at often enough that it reads as neutral to me.

font is serif, sans, or mono. Not a font name, a family choice. You cannot ask for Garamond here, and I have decided to be grateful about that.

background is optional, and it is the escape hatch. Set it and it overrides the page color that the mode would have given you, while leaving everything else about that mode alone. Mine is #F5EBDC, a warm cream. The rest of light mode still applies. I just did not want the gallery white.

The whole sitting took twenty minutes. Then I went and cut the parts for a bench.