The visual library

Principles

1. One anatomy on every page: header, page head, body with a margin, page foot, footer.
2. Content is the only variable. Places differ in what they hold, never in where things go.
3. Everything is an entry with an address: place, kind, date and slug give one permanent URL and one row.
4. Visuals carry meaning: every mark is real or explains something real.
5. Paper and three pigments: ink, indigo, maroon. One pigment per element; two never mix.
6. Fraunces for titles, Figtree to read, JetBrains Mono for labels; Tamil is first-class.
7. Nothing overlaps. No counts, no streaks. No em dashes. Works without JavaScript, on a phone, at night.

Colour · day

Colour · night

Type

Space

Grid

The order of making

Marks happen in the order a hand makes them, and each medium keeps to its job, its pigment and its place. Every engine, scene, collection and diagram is on the visual library.

• 1Pencil · graphitethinking: construction lines, notes and arrows on figuresfigures, margins
• 2Ink · sumi blackdeciding: the line that is true, the data, the ensōfigures, inquiries, branches and birds
• 3Wash · indigowhat matters: a range, a region, a term, a skyfigures, covers, sparingly
• 4Charcoal, crayon, oil pastel · one pigment per markwarmth and play: sketches and personal piecesMusings, the sketchbook
• 5Kolam · ink line on paperthe threshold, drawn fresh each daythe front door only
• 6Hanko · maroonsigning: the theme switch, and the stamp on a settled piecethe header, the end of a piece

Places

• /writing/WritingEssays on what I study and build, and musings on everything else: reflections, poems in English and Tamil, and the sketchbook.essay · reflection · poem · dialogue · sketch
• /lab/LabExperiments, notebooks and builds. Each one starts from a question, and its failures stay in the book.log · build · study · notebook · day · model · dataset
• /lessons/LessonsBentos of ten essential readings, courses I work through in the open, tutorials and primers from first principles, and the shelf I read from. Written so the next person gets there faster.bento · course · session · track · primer · tutorial · note · reading
• /inquiries/InquiriesWhat I keep asking, what I think now and how sure I am, and the work beneath each one. Answers welcome.inquiry
• /correspondence/CorrespondenceWhen an experiment changes my mind, I write a letter about it. There is no schedule, and each one asks you something back.letter

Components

def forget_less(features, classes):
    # one covariance, pooled over every class seen so far
    mu = {k: features[classes == k].mean(0) for k in set(classes)}
    return mu, shrink(cov(features))

E9 Artwork an open-access work, shown whole and credited

Where things live

• site.jsonidentity, places, shelves, frames, the nav: the one config
• content//.mda piece; or content/<place>/<slug>/index.md with its figures beside it
• content/_data/art.json (credits for open-access works) and art-assign.json (which work stands in for which piece)
• design/tokens.cssevery colour, family, size and space
• design/components/.cssone file per component, named as on this page
• art/the mark-making engines: sumi (ensō, seal, ink), kolam, wash (watercolour, pencil), dry media, garden
• figures/the house kit for technical figures: matplotlib style, TikZ preamble, rules
• press/the build: content → components → layouts → pages
• static/fonts, vendored libraries, open-access images
• legacy/the old site, served unchanged until each page is ported
• tools/new.py (start a piece), check.py (links, devices), art.py (fetch an open-access work)