Colophon

How this site was made

Twenty-eight decisions, five real options for each one, decided one at a time. This is the record — what I chose, and what I turned down.

Most personal sites are a template with someone’s name dropped into it. That is not a knock on templates. It is that all the choices have already been made for you, by somebody who has never met you, and the result is a page that could belong to anyone with your job title.

I wanted to make the choices myself, so I built this the way I build product. Twenty-eight decisions. Five real options for each. Decided one at a time, top to bottom — and every option was built and rendered at full size before I chose, because a thing described and a thing built are never the same thing.

This page is the record. It is here because in my work the reasoning is the part that matters, and a finished thing tells you almost nothing about how it was reasoned.

The colourGold, because of a gold rush

Charlotte had a gold rush before California did. A boy named Conrad Reed found a seventeen-pound rock in Little Meadow Creek, east of here, in 1799 — and the family used it as a doorstop for three years before anyone worked out what it was. By the 1830s there were hundreds of mines across this part of the state, and in 1837 the United States opened a branch mint in Charlotte to strike the gold on site rather than haul it to Philadelphia. Coins from that mint carry a small C.

That is where the gold on this site comes from. Not a colour I liked — a fact about where I live. It is dulled toward brass rather than a heraldic yellow, because the reference is a struck coin, not a crown.

The rule that came with it: gold appears as hairlines, one mark and one figure. Never as a fill. The moment it becomes a block of colour it stops reading as a mintmark and starts reading as a bank’s brand guidelines.

The typeThree faces, three jobs, and a Hebrew alphabet

Fraunces sets the headlines, with two of its variable axes engaged — one that makes the letters look like ink soaking into paper, another that gives the h, n and m a slight lean. Departure Mono sets every number on the site, because the numbers here are meant to look measured rather than marketed.

The reading face is Cardo, and it won for a reason that has nothing to do with how it looks. Cardo carries Latin, Greek and Hebrew in one family. I write about Jewish texts, and I have built an app that teaches Hebrew through song and liturgy. Every other face on the shortlist would have forced a second typeface the moment a Hebrew word appeared.

With Cardo, נַעֲשֶׂה sets in the same face as the sentence around it — with full vowel pointing, as live text you can select and search. Not a picture of a word. The word.

Three faces, three jobs, no sans anywhere. Display, reading, data. Nothing on this site is set in a typeface that is not doing a specific job.

The one moving thingRestraint is the whole trick

I looked at a great many personal sites while building this one. The ones I could still remember a day later had exactly one piece of deliberate craft in them. The forgettable ones had four.

So this site has one. Hover the headline on the home page and the letters thicken slightly over about a third of a second, as if ink were soaking into the paper. Nothing else moves, anywhere.

That restraint is what makes the one thing land. It also agrees with everything around it: the gold is a mintmark, the divider under the hero is the milled edge of a coin, and the only animation on the site is type behaving like ink hitting stock. Struck, pressed, made here.

The argumentWhy aerospace and finance are the same industry

The sentence under my name took longer to find than anything else on the site, because it had to do the hardest job: explain in one line why a career that spans financial services and aerospace is one career rather than two.

99% is an A in most industries. In aerospace and finance, it is an incident report.

Ninety-nine percent of planes landing is a catastrophe. Ninety-nine percent of your money arriving where you sent it is a catastrophe. Both industries live entirely in the last one percent, and both are among the very few places where the regulator and the customer want exactly the same thing — which is no surprises at all.

I could have written a sentence about Charlotte instead. The city really does build banks and airplanes, and it is genuinely unusual for having both. But a sentence about the city explains my geography. This one explains the work, and the work is the thing worth explaining.

The evidenceEvery number names its owner

Four impressive figures in a row, with nothing attached to them, are not evidence. They are four numbers a person has chosen to show you. The reader has no way to tell whether they came from one project or four, one employer or three, last year or a decade ago — and a reader who cannot tell will assume the flattering arrangement was deliberate.

A number with no owner is not proof of anything.

So every result on this site carries the employer, the year and the problem it solved. It makes the section longer and considerably less punchy. It is also the difference between a claim and a fact, and I would rather be checkable than quotable.

The bookPublish it, do not claim it

I recorded nine conversations with people who went from nothing to something, and then I wrote down what all nine of them had in common. That is Zero to Sixty, and it is going up here as a free PDF — no email address required.

The easier move would have been a line on this page saying I had written a book. But every other claim on this site is something you can open: the loan review, the taps, the licence, the podcast, the apps. A book you cannot read would be the one item on the page that asks to be taken on faith, sitting directly beside things that do not.

I would rather hand you the thing than tell you it exists.

The ruleEverything here can be checked

One line ran underneath all twenty-eight decisions and settled most of the arguments:

If you cannot check it, it does not go on the site.

It is why the numbers carry employers. Why the book is being published rather than mentioned. Why one recommendation appears in full — with a name, a face and a link to the person who wrote it — instead of five trimmed to their best adjectives. And why this page exists at all.