How this site is made.
A colophon is an old printing tradition, the page at the back of a book that tells you how it was set. This is that page.
The words
Every essay, poem, and story here is written by me, Sameer. No ghostwriter, no AI drafts. The typos are mine too, and I have publicly defended their honor. AI helps me build and maintain the site itself, the words stay human.
The type
- Zodiak sets the headlines. A high-contrast serif from the Indian Type Foundry's Fontshare catalog.
- Literata sets the body text. A variable serif commissioned for long-form reading on screens.
- Switzer handles buttons, navigation, and captions.
- Sometype Mono carries the dates, read times, and stats.
- Caveat does the handwriting in the margins. The scribbles, underlines, and wavy dividers are hand-drawn SVGs.
The colors
The design is called Paper & Sea. Daylight is paper: bone ground, espresso ink, deep sea teal for everything you can click, clay for the hand marks. Dark mode is not inverted paper, it is the water I actually dive in, deep and green-blue. Flip the toggle in the nav and see.
The stack
Static Astro, served from Cloudflare Pages at the edge. No framework runtime, no database, pages ship as plain HTML. Search runs on Pagefind, entirely in your browser.
The history
- 2013 First posts on a self-hosted WordPress. Nokia reviews, Karachi essays, poems typed up from old notebooks.
- 2024 A WordPress reimport quietly reset most publish dates. Some were later recovered from Internet Archive snapshots, the rest are marked honestly as undated.
- 2026 Rebuilt as a static Astro site in May. Redesigned as Paper & Sea in July: new type, new colors, and a dark mode that goes underwater.
Static, fast, and quiet.