Monochrome by Choice

I gave this site one rule: black and white, nothing else. No brand blue, no accent green, no "just one gradient." The palette is the constraint, and the constraint is the point.

Constraints are a design tool

When you remove color, you have to find hierarchy somewhere else — in scale, in weight, in space, in the tension between a huge grotesk headline and a whisper of monospace metadata. Color is the easy lever. Take it away and you're forced to design with the harder, better ones.

The absence of color is not the absence of contrast. It's an invitation to be precise about everything else.

Where the depth comes from

There's no hue, but there's still a ramp:

• A near-black canvas, so the page feels like a stage.
• Layered grays for surfaces and hairlines that expose the grid like a schematic.
• Pure white, rationed — it only shows up on the thing you're meant to touch.
• A few percent of film grain, so the black never goes flat.

A note on code

Even the syntax highlighting is monochrome. Keywords get weight, comments get quiet, and nothing gets a color it didn't earn:

function hierarchy(el: Element): number {
  // weight and space do the work color used to
  return el.scale * el.contrast;
}

That's the whole idea. Fewer variables, held to a higher standard.