Type, colour, and how this site is made

Colophon

This site is plain static HTML with self-hosted fonts and no third-party requests, trackers or analytics.

Institutions: The University of Hong Kong · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · National University of Singapore. Funder to be confirmed.
Type: Literata for editorial Latin, IBM Plex Sans for interface, IBM Plex Mono for identifiers; Gowun Batang with Noto Serif CJK KR for Korean and Hanja, Noto Serif and Sans TC for Traditional Chinese, Jigmo for CJK Extensions B–H. Switching language never changes the Latin faces: the Latin faces lead every stack and the CJK faces cover only CJK.
CJK coverage: The full Noto CJK builds, not the Google Fonts language subsets, sliced by unicode range so a page fetches only the slices it uses. Gowun Batang carries the full Hangul syllabary. Jigmo covers Extensions B–H; its Japanese glyph forms are a documented caveat.
Font licences: Literata, IBM Plex Sans, IBM Plex Sans KR, IBM Plex Mono, Gowun Batang, Noto Serif and Sans CJK, and Jigmo are all used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Licence texts are kept with the sources in fonts-src/.
Colour: A cool neutral paper with graphite text in light mode, and a low-light ground that is never black in dark mode. Lapis-gray marks computational mediation — model inference, comparison, the Pivot, provenance paths — and is never used to make a result look more authoritative than its source. No traffic-light colours and no confidence meters.
Line grammar: The bow — a long rule with a barely perceptible curve — separates sections. The pivoted rule, which bends once, marks a change of interpretive level.
The mark: The mark is not a bamboo. Four separate strokes leave a void that becomes, after a moment, a culm with a joint and the beginning of a branch. The strokes stay distinct; the whole is provisional.
How it is built: Static HTML generated by a Python builder (tools/build_ph_home.py) from JSON content files, sharing one page shell and one design system with pivot.playingheaven.ai. No build-time JavaScript framework, no runtime font or script requests. The interactive apparatus — the Pivot return, the palimpsest, the theme toggle — is progressive enhancement and the pages read without it.
Languages: English is the source. Korean reuses the approved Korean text of the project overview; passages written for this site alone are marked and shown in English until a Korean version exists. The Traditional Chinese version is a labelled draft awaiting review, and no Chinese name for the project has been coined.
Accessibility: Semantic landmarks, skip link, keyboard-operable controls, visible focus, reduced-motion support; source, inference and synthesis distinguished by label as well as colour.
Source and model accountability: Textual statements are set in ink and cite a location. Model inferences are set in mineral blue and marked as such. Nothing in blue is presented as more authoritative than the source it depends on.
Preservation: Every page is plain HTML with self-hosted assets; corpus deposit locations to be published.
Revised: 2026-09-03