A small record of the design choices, typography, and tools behind SkylerBuilds.com. Most personal sites don't bother with a colophon. I think the choices are worth showing.
A personal mark should outlast every product you build. I wanted something that wasn't a monogram, wasn't an abstract geometric shape, and wasn't a signature. The plumb line is a real tool. It carries the values that matter to me: precision before motion, intention over impulse, working with the hands, the bias toward true.
It is also, I hope, distinctive enough that nobody else is going to show up with the same one.
Drawn as inline SVG, ~6 paths, on a 100×200 grid. Uses currentColor so it inherits whatever color its parent has. The favicon version is on a 64×64 grid with slightly heavier strokes for legibility at 16px.
Three typefaces, each doing different work. Newsreader is the serif for any text you'd actually sit and read: note body, decks, signoffs. Inter is the workhorse sans, used at heavy weights and large sizes for the lowercase display headlines that anchor the brand. IBM Plex Mono is the structural typeface for everything that has a job to do: labels, metadata, the eyebrows that organize sections.
The combination is editorial without being precious, contemporary without being trend-chasing, and serious without being humorless.
A near-black ink (#0a0a0a) on a warm stone gray (#f5f5f5). Slightly less harsh than pure black-on-white. The Now strip and footer invert this for visual rhythm.
A single bright persimmon (#ff4d1f) used very sparingly, only for the eyebrow labels and the drop cap that opens each note. The accent is meant to feel like a single underline a careful editor would make, not a marketing color.
This site is meant to last. Not in the sense of "never updated" (the notes feed will grow, the projects will rotate, the Now section will refresh). But the bones (the typography, the mark, the structural ideas) should still feel right in five years. Most sites optimize for what looks current in 2026. I'd rather build something that ages gracefully.
No popups. No newsletter prompts. No "subscribe to get my free guide." No metrics on the page to impress. No social proof bars. No testimonials. The only call to action is the email address in the footer, and that's intentional. If the work is interesting, the work is the call to action.
The little imperfections are not bugs. The site is built by one person, by hand, in a code editor, on nights and weekends. It is not a Webflow template. It is not a Notion site. It is the kind of site you make when you care about every line of the markup.