Colophon · How this site is built
The site is the work sample.
Before you open a single case study, you are already reading the strongest one. This page is hand-written HTML — no framework, no page builder, no template bought and reskinned. Every rule below is a decision, and every decision is legible in the source.
Three families, one job each. Instrument Serif carries display and statements. Radio Canada carries prose and the wordmark. IBM Plex Mono carries labels, data, and captions — the machine-read voice. Instrument Sans was removed from the system entirely.
The serif has one hard rule: it never renders below 24px. Its thin strokes are about a fifteenth of cap height, so at 16px a hairline falls to roughly three-quarters of a device pixel and the rasteriser greys it into mush — on the 1× Windows laptops most of this audience uses, retina cannot be assumed. Where a viewport can't afford 24px, titles swap to Radio Canada 700 rather than shrink the serif into its failure zone.
Colour is bound to a legend, never used for decoration. Blue means one thing across the whole site — read this. It is not a hover accent and not a brand flourish. Red marks an ambiguous or null value; sage marks a resolved one. That discipline is the difference between a heads-up display and a skin.
Static HTML and one hand-authored stylesheet. No build step, no bundler, no runtime dependency beyond three web fonts and an icon set. The whole site is a handful of documents you could read end to end. It is versioned on GitHub and deploys to Vercel on every push — the commit is the release.
Zero corner radius, hairline borders, a fixed instrument grid. The chrome carries the heavy responsive work so the prose never has to; the frame yields to the content, not the reverse.
It passes its own audit. Every interactive control has a visible focus ring, every destination icon is paired with screen-reader text, motion respects prefers-reduced-motion, and a skip link leads the keyboard straight to the content. Accessibility is treated as part of the craft, not a compliance pass bolted on at the end.
The design system is called Eishiki — 意識, Japanese for consciousness or awareness. The name is inherited from a Flash portfolio built in 2002, carried forward as a reminder that the instinct is old and the discipline is the same.