The design system

This site is its own style guide. Everything below is rendered from the same tokens and components the rest of the site uses: three tiers (primitive → semantic → component), composed with CSS cascade layers.

Colophon

Who made this, and how.

Anthropic's Claude wrote most of this site's code and copy, working under my direction: a written voice guide the drafts are audited against, three tiers of design tokens with components touching only the semantic tier, an edge worker with a signed session cookie gating the confidential work, and types, lint, formatting, and a full build on every change. I reviewed every line and decided what shipped.

Some things I rejected on purpose: a server-rendering framework for a fully static site, Tailwind in place of the token system, trackers of any kind, web fonts that cost load time and trip corporate network filters, and the numbered-section tropes of template landing pages. The diagrams in the case studies are inline SVG drawn from the same tokens as everything else, so they re-theme like any component.

Color

Authored in OKLCH. Components consume the semantic tier.

Semantic roles

--color-bg
--color-surface-sunken
--color-text
--color-text-muted
--color-border
--color-accent
--color-success
--color-warning
--color-danger

Neutral ramp

0501002003004005006007008009009501000

Accent ramp

50100200300400500600700800900

Typography

A 1.20 fluid scale that adapts between mobile and desktop.

--text-display Display — Handgloves 0123
--text-h1 Heading 1 — Handgloves 0123
--text-h2 Heading 2 — Handgloves 0123
--text-h3 Heading 3 — Handgloves 0123
--text-h4 Heading 4 — Handgloves 0123
--text-body Body — Handgloves 0123
--text-small Small — Handgloves 0123
--text-caption Caption — Handgloves 0123

Space & radii

One scale drives rhythm everywhere.

Spacing

--space-3xs
--space-2xs
--space-xs
--space-sm
--space-md
--space-lg
--space-xl
--space-2xl
--space-3xl
--space-4xl
--space-5xl

Radii

--radius-sm 0
--radius-md 0
--radius-lg 0
--radius-xl 0
--radius-pill 0

Components

Built from the tokens above, scoped in the components layer.

Buttons

Tags

Design systems Featured Protected

Eyebrow & lead

Section label

A lead paragraph, used to set up a section with slightly larger, muted type.

Signature

Borrowed from print: department heads, standfirst deks, drop caps, pull quotes, folios, and a single deliberate accent (one hue token, --accent-h). Numerals appear only as folios, never as decorative section indices.

Department head & dek

A department head

The standfirst: a larger lead-in line under a headline that sets up what follows, set apart from body text.

Folio

Josh Crow · Portfolio · 2026

Pull quote

The constraints arrived first, and the brief was to build inside them. — specimen text

Caption

Figure 1 — a caption, set small and italic.

Motion

Sections fade and lift once as they enter view, disabled under prefers-reduced-motion.