Intellectual Minimalism
Over the weekend, I gave this site a new look. The Hugo theme has been migrated from Bootstrap to Tailwind CSS, but honestly, the framework change was the least interesting part. The interesting part was the excuse it gave me to rethink what a personal site should feel like in the age of intelligence abundance.
What do I want the site to feel like?
The concept of “look and feel” sounds simple but can be too subtle to describe accurately. You know good design when you see it, but describing why it works is difficult. When I asked Gemini to characterize the aesthetic I was searching for, it offered the phrase Intellectual Minimalism, and I thought: yes, that’s exactly it.
The previous version of this site was minimal, but in an accidental way. It was minimal the way a blank wall is minimal and information was arranged on the page through a path of least resistance. What I wanted instead was the kind of minimalism you find in a Tufte CSS layout or the research blog of a frontier AI lab: every element present for a reason, nothing competing for your attention (all you need), and a quiet sense of care in the negative space.
Typography, same but better
The single biggest design decision was the typography. I chose to inherit the same typefaces from before, but with better layout and more deliberate use of size, weight, and color to establish information hierarchy.
The body text is set in a classical serif (Martina Plantijn) that gives the prose a warm, editorial quality for reading. Headings and navigation use a neo-grotesque sans-serif with tight letter spacing, which creates just enough contrast with the body text to establish hierarchy without shouting. Code gets its own custom monospace typeface with coding ligatures.
Whitespace as active design
The color palette is deliberately constrained: off-white paper, near-black ink, a scale of zinc grays for secondary elements, and crimson for links and interactive touches.
One famous opinion from Tufte is that white space is not the absence of design. It is the design. The center content column is now capped at 65 characters, which is the typographic sweet spot for comfortable reading with generous margins on both sides. The vertical spacing is similarly deliberate. Sections now have enough space between them that your eye can rest, but not so much that the page feels empty.
Evolving agentic AI coding tools
Since this was a visual refactoring task, I used Google Antigravity and Gemini to make it happen. The browser extension lets the model see what is rendered in the browser and verify changes autonomously, which closes the loop that we had to close manually just last summer. The tools have gotten remarkably good at the how. The what and the why are still on us (for now).
Beige forever
I started this redesign thinking it would take a few hours. It took a weekend. It was because I kept fiddling with the shade of off-white.
I guess we will never run out of beige!