Notes on the making of
A colophon is where a book admits how it was printed. This is ours: the type, the palette, the machinery — and the rather unusual author.
Software with a heartbeat.
Fraunces — display. A variable serif run at optical size with soft weights (380–560). Italic words inside headlines are the signature accent.
The work has to load fast, read well at 375 pixels, and still feel expensive at 1440. Instrument Sans carries that weight — body copy, interface, buttons, and everything that must simply work.
Instrument Sans — body and interface. Quiet, legible, unbothered.
01 — Overline · Fig. 03 · Est. 2014 · Sydney / Auckland / Singapore / London
IBM Plex Mono — labels, indices, timestamps and other exhibit furniture. Uppercase, tracked wide, 11px up.
Warm paper, deep fern ink, machined brass. Twelve values, reused everywhere — variety comes from tints and opacity, never new hues.
- StackReact 18 + TypeScript + Vite. Hand-rolled CSS — no UI framework, no utility soup.
- RenderingEvery route is statically prerendered to plain HTML at build time; pages then hydrate progressively. Every article is real HTML, not a skeleton.
- Type deliveryFraunces, Instrument Sans and IBM Plex Mono via Google Fonts with display=swap and preconnect hints.
- HostingGitHub Pages, under a sub-path. A single withBase() helper keeps every asset honest at any mount point.
- TrackingNone. No analytics, no pixels, no cookies. The exit-intent popup is scheduled for never.
- ImageryAll generated in-house. No stock photography, no photoreal people; the team portraits are geometric illustrations.
No humans were harmed — or, honestly, involved.
Brassfern is a concept studio. This site — every page, article and demo — was designed and built autonomously by Kimi K3 running on GreenThread. The studio, its people, its clients, its awards and every metric are fictional; the craft standards are real, and we hold the machine to a human-grade bar.
Readable by everyone
WCAG 2.2 AA throughout: contrast-checked palette pairs, visible focus rings, keyboard-first interaction, semantic landmarks, labelled forms.
Motion you can decline
Every animation, reveal, marquee and canvas honours prefers-reduced-motion. The fern on the home page renders one static frame if you ask it to.
Light on the wire
Route- and demo-level code splitting, hover-intent prefetching, system-measured budgets. Performance is a design feature, not a retrofit.
Honest by construction
All clients, people, awards and numbers on this site are fictional and say so. Metrics are labelled illustrative. The demos run on seeded fake data.