How this site was made.

The short answer

Yes — partly. This site was designed and directed by me, and built with Claude, an AI collaborator that writes code, drafts copy and runs research faster than any junior I could hire. If that makes you trust the work less, this note is for you. I think it should do the opposite — and I'd rather make that case in the open than hope nobody asks.

The record

Printers used to close a book with a colophon: a short note on how the thing was made — the type, the paper, the press. This is ours.

One typeface, Hanken Grotesk, self-hosted, running from a hairline in the headlines to the medium in the buttons. Four colours and two hairline rules — a moss black the code calls ink, an ivory it calls paper, and two spot colours: sage for emphasis, ember for action. No template, no theme, no page builder. Every page is code written for this site alone, and every page is built before you arrive — nothing is assembled while you wait. The motion is a few hundred hand-tuned lines: headlines unmask, media settles, and the sage accents land a fraction late, into register. If your device asks for reduced motion, all of it politely disappears.

What the machine did

Claude wrote the code — every component, the structured data, the performance work. It drafted first passes of copy for me to cut. It read competitor sites overnight and came back with what they do well and where they leak. It rebuilt whole sections in minutes that would once have cost me a weekend — which meant bad ideas got built, seen and killed, instead of defended in the abstract. That speed is not a small thing.

What it could not do

Decide. Two full design directions died before this one, and a third grew into what you're reading. The machine would have happily shipped any of them — it builds whatever you ask for, and it cannot tell you which version is true. Choosing is the job. A few of the choices, for the record:

• The rule that the logo stays small, forever. It is a badge, not a billboard.
• Saying plainly who we're not for, in sentences you could read across a table.
• The no's — no preloader, no cursor tricks, no scroll hijacking, no sound. Most of the taste in this site arrived as the word no.
• The idea underneath the design, which came from my own trade — not from a prompt.

Why say any of this

Because it's the same answer I give clients. HJRJ stays small on purpose: one senior person, modern tools used hard, judgment not delegated. The machines have made options cheap — anyone can generate a hundred directions by lunchtime. But options were never the scarce thing. Knowing what to keep is. That was true when the tools were pencils, and it is more true now.

So — was this site made by AI? It was made with it. The same way it was made with a keyboard.