Concept & Colophon
A Look Behind the Curtain
Concept
calebk.com is a design experiment in creating an essential website.
It is not an exercise in minimalism, brutalism, or low-tech design per se. Instead, this site is the result of intentional design decisions focused around 3 goals:
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Usability
Concise, accessible
User Respect
Private, secure, green
Performance
Fast, nimble, reliable
Such decisions necessitate tradeoffs (some not minimalist at all). For instance, using web fonts trades maximum efficiency for [what I believe is] a meaningful enhancement to the end experience.
A few sources of inspiration: Low-Tech Solar Website, After Dark
Colophon
calebk.com is a static site compiled using tools like webpack, Markdown, PUG, and SASS to output valid, standards-compliant HTML5 and CSS.
It uses no dev-convenience tools client-side (frameworks, etc.), saving user bandwidth and maximizing speed. Accordingly, the site targets sub-second load times over 3G and weighs just over 100KB on average.
It also conforms to strict privacy and security practices (SSL, CSP, strong ciphers, etc.). There are no cookies or client-side analytics and no use of third-parties of any kind.
Typeface: IBM Plex Sans, a beautiful open-source project from IBM's design team. Custom glyph subset for speed.