Notes on Restraint

The easiest way to make a page feel calm is to remove things from it, not add things to it. A quieter type scale. Fewer weights. One accent color used sparingly enough that it still means something when it appears.

Type does most of the work

Most of what people call "design" on a text-first site is really just typography: a comfortable measure (somewhere around 60-75 characters per line), enough line-height that paragraphs don't feel like a wall, and a type scale with just enough steps to mark a hierarchy without turning every page into a slide deck.

The accent color is a sentence, not a paint job

If a color shows up on every element, it stops being a signal. Save it for the things that actually want attention -- a link on hover, a tag, the occasional pull quote. Everywhere else, let the text be text.

Dark mode is not a toggle, it's a second set of decisions

Inverting lightness is the easy 80%. The last 20% -- desaturating an accent so it doesn't vibrate on a dark background, softening pure black to a near-black so text doesn't glare -- is where dark mode either feels considered or feels like a CSS filter.