Colophon

Purpose

This site is a personal technical field manual — a quiet index of work, writing, and experiments by Abdul Basit Khan. It favors clarity over spectacle.

Design

Still Index — a manuscript identity: a bound codex by day, the same pages under lamplight by night. Two themes run over one set of semantic tokens, chosen with data-theme and remembered per visitor: paper (default, aged rag stock in daylight) and vellum (dark walnut and ink under lamplight). The CRT phosphor mode from the July 2026 redesign is retired; visitors with the old dark setting land on vellum automatically.

Typography: Newsreader (editorial) and IBM Plex Mono (interface).
Color: Paper keeps the daylight palette — aged canvas, ink-toned text. Vellum swaps to a dark walnut and ink ground with warm candle-amber text and a gold-leaf accent. Sealing-wax red carries the primary action. Every text and accent token holds WCAG AA contrast (4.5:1) on its own canvas in both themes; meaningful lines hold at least 3:1.
Texture: A single warm paper grain, felt rather than seen, and nothing that imitates a physical object. An earlier version of this design added a torn deckle edge, a stitched binding gutter, and scroll rods; they were built, looked at, and removed for reading like a prop rather than a page. What remains is typographic: a wax seal on the primary "Book a conversation" action and the version stamp, illuminated initials opening articles, fleurons and a dinkus marking section breaks, marginalia in the ruled margin at wide widths folding inline below, and folios numbering the page at the foot. All of it is CSS and inline SVG, with no raster images and no added dependency, and a single intensity token scales the decorative weight without touching body text, contrast, or layout.

Technology

Next.js 15 App Router, React 19, TypeScript
Tailwind CSS v4
Static export for Cloudflare Pages
Local Markdown content, build-time parsing
CSS transitions and the View Transitions API for page-turn navigation on route change (progressive enhancement; browsers without support show no transition)

Accessibility

Semantic HTML, skip link, visible focus states
Keyboard navigation with arrow-key enhancement on the home index, unchanged by the theme work
Mobile index dialog with focus trapping and Escape support
prefers-reduced-motion: reduce removes all nonessential animation, including the page turn, the ink-bleed hover, and the wax seal press
WCAG AA contrast for all meaningful text, verified against both the paper and vellum canvases
Decorative surfaces (texture, deckle mask, gutter, rods) are pointer-events: none and never clip the skip link or a focus ring

Credits

Design influences: Lynn Fisher, Steph Ango, and Mitchell Hashimoto.

Version history

v.1.2.0 (2026-09-18) — Audit-driven revamp. The document now scrolls like a document, so Back restores your reading position and the address bar can hide; viewport-fit=cover brings the safe area back on notched hardware; every hover style is behind a hover-capable pointer; and Escape, Backspace and the sitemap stopped doing things they should not. The home page was rebuilt as a compact title page whose chapter index is the navigation, with the version, theme state and keyboard hint beneath it, and its type scale now tightens tracking as type grows instead of giving every heading one value.
v.1.1.0 (2026-08-14) — Manuscript pass. Paper and vellum themes replace the CRT dark mode, and the page gains typographic furniture: sealing wax on the primary action, illuminated initials, fleurons, marginalia, and folios. A heavier skeuomorphic layer — deckle edge, binding gutter, scroll rods — was built in the same pass and cut before release. The Still Index chapter structure, type system, and keyboard navigation are unchanged.
v.1.0.0 (2026-07-14) — Still Index redesign. Editorial dark field-manual interface replacing the Dark Premium portfolio.