Colophon · About this site

Built thoughtfully.

How this site is put together — type, palette, build, hosting, source-of-truth. Every line below maps to a decision in SITE_DECISIONS.md so the "why" stays one click away from the "what".

The stack

What this is made of

Pages: Hand-written HTML adapted as Hugo templates. No client routing, no SPA. Each rendered page has a corresponding .md source file in the repo; the markdown is canonical, the HTML is the styled view. B-001 · B-003 · B-018 · B-029
Build: Hugo generates the site from the markdown sources. Layout templates pull in the shared theme; page content stays portable. B-020 (supersedes B-004)
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages, deploying from main on push. Domain: BySimms.co. B-021 (supersedes B-005)
Theme: CSS custom properties on :root (light, default) and [data-theme="dark"]. Toggling is a single attribute swap, persisted to localStorage with a prefers-color-scheme fallback. See the brand book. B-006 · B-007 · B-008
CSS: Shared system in /css/theme.css, print overrides in /css/print.css. Page-unique styles stay inline. B-022 (closes OQ-B1)
Type: Instrument Serif for display, Geist for body and UI, JetBrains Mono for eyebrows, IDs, and metadata. Mrs Saint Delafield as the signature script. B-012 · B-023
Accent: Burgundy (#8b3a2f) in light, lifting to terracotta (#d4897a) in dark. One italic word per display headline, colored with this accent — the signature pattern. B-013
Mark: Script "S" — for Simms. Path-traced after Mrs Saint Delafield so the favicon renders identically across browsers and OSes (an SVG <text> reference would fall back to whatever script face the OS happened to have). Two-file: favicon.svg (light UA) and favicon-dark.svg (dark UA), auto-swapped via prefers-color-scheme. B-023 (closes OQ-B7)
Source: Public repo on GitHub. Markdown files (BRAND.md, SITE_DECISIONS.md, DECISIONS.md, etc.) are the source of truth; rendered HTML and CSS land in the same repo. B-003 · OQ-B5 (resolved public)
Author: Simms · BySimms.co · Richmond, VA. May 2026

Simms

SET IN MRS SAINT DELAFIELD · BySimms.co

In passing

Thanks & tradeoffs

The brand book documents itself in itself, which means it stays in lock-step with production code (the doc is the code). The cost is portability — it's harder to hand a partner a PDF spec. Brand book · B-016.

Markdown → HTML is a manual translation today. With four sources already in flight, a small Hugo shortcode for the palette table is probably the next thing to script. OQ-B4 is still open.

None of the type is self-hosted yet; all four families come from Google Fonts. OQ-B6 tracks whether to flip that.

The site targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The full statement — closed items, open questions, and how to report a problem — lives on the accessibility page. B-028.