colophon

This site is its own first case study. It was rebuilt from scratch in July 2026 — the entire previous site was archived to git history, and only the logo survived.

Concept

The mark is a single continuous line drawing “109” as a waveform. The site follows the same idea: signal over noise. A near-monochrome palette, one accent used only to carry information, and typography doing the work decoration usually pretends to do.

Type

Headings are set in Fraunces, body text in Inter, and metadata in JetBrains Mono — all variable fonts, self-hosted at build time via next/font, so no third-party requests and no layout shift.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router), static-first with on-demand revalidation for project media managed via a private admin tool, on Vercel
• TypeScript strict, React 19
• Tailwind CSS 4 — tokens as CSS variables, dark mode first
• MDX via content-collections, with Zod-validated frontmatter: invalid content fails the build
• Syntax highlighting rendered at build time with shiki

Principles

• Entrance motion is pure CSS, so content paints before any JavaScript loads and prefers-reduced-motion is honoured by one global rule.
• The only client-side JavaScript on most pages is the theme toggle.
• Accessibility is verified with axe and a keyboard pass on every change; performance is gated at Lighthouse 95+.

The full story of the rebuild is in rebuilding 1zero9.com in the open.