Logbook 2026-10-30

Today the identity started turning into a website.

The morning opened with two last corrections on the canvas. At its smallest, the mascot no longer uses outlined cells, only shades of blue and black: the black outlines didn’t work at that size. And the whole type scale moved down, from titles to labels.

Those were the last changes on the canvas. Looking back, working in Claude Design was an excellent and smooth experience, at least in the order I did things. Having a canvas was a real advantage. Every proposal and its iterations sat on the same infinite canvas, easy to see side by side. I could quickly add, arrange or draw content to feed the thinking. And to give Claude feedback from one iteration to the next, I could comment on a precise element instead of having to describe everything.

The idea of taste I had noted in my personal knowledge base, as judgment built through correction, also made a lot of sense, and proved true more than once. It took a large amount of initial material, and a lot of ideas and leads put on the table, to set aside the ones that weren’t relevant and dig into the ones with potential.

Then I set out how I wanted to continue. First, a DESIGN.md file describing the visual direction, one document to feed as the work goes on, after a look at the best standards for this kind of file. The most advanced format is still an alpha: tokens at the top, then prose saying when and why to use them. I asked for it in English. Second, the technical stack. For years I’ve worked with Eleventy, Sass and Netlify, and I wanted to consider Astro, which I know a little, in place of Eleventy. The site will be in English only, with its content written in Markdown in the repository. The image generator stays private: it lives next to the site, in one repository holding all the tools, but it’s never published.

The folder where the exploration happened was only meant for exploring, so the work moved to the site’s repository, starting with the foundations rather than moving everything first. By the evening it held the site, design tokens generated from DESIGN.md, the cells and the mascot as reusable components, the illustration tool, and a first landing page. I noted a few things for later along the way: a favicon that was too big, and an idea for a feed page where every update to the site would show up as a post, like on a mobile social feed.

The domain came last. Before pushing anything, I asked for a few key questions so we could choose a provider together. I wanted the .com only, and simplicity above all. I’ve used several registrars in the past, but this time I bought it where the site is hosted, with email handled by a simple forwarding service. The landing page waits in a pull request: I want to review it in detail before it goes live.