Bringing the bridge online

I've rebuilt this site more times than I'd like to admit, and every version eventually collapsed under the weight of its own good taste. Clean grids, safe type, a hero that looked like everyone else's hero.

This time I wanted a layout with a personality that couldn't be mistaken for a template, so I went looking for a UI language that was never designed for the web at all. LCARS was built for a fictional starship computer in the 1980s, all color-coded panels and elbow joints, and it turns out those constraints translate surprisingly well into a place for writing things down.

The colors aren't decoration, they're a map. Orange is for the front door, gold is for the log, violet is for background on the person writing it. Once I set that rule I stopped fighting the palette and started using it.

There's still a lot of gray area between homage and cosplay. My goal was to keep the reading experience calm and get out of the way of the words, while letting the frame around them do something a little theatrical. Whether that balance holds is something I'll keep adjusting as more entries land here.