People keep calling the redesign a repaint, and I understand why, because the colour is the thing you see before you've read a word. It's also the last decision I made. The structure came first, then the gates that hold it honest, then the type, and the palette went on top of all of it once the rest was standing up on its own. So it's a little strange to me that the warm brown is the thing that gets mentioned, when it's the part I spent the least time agonising over. But it gets mentioned, so it's worth saying out loud why it's warm, and why it's deliberately old-looking.
The palette every developer reaches for
The site this replaced was an off-white ground with a green accent and a soft gradient sitting behind the hero. I could show you forty portfolios that look almost exactly like that. A cool light background, one saturated accent, a gradient that shifts a bit as you scroll, a neat toggle for dark mode, and a typeface that's either Inter or trying very hard to be mistaken for it. It's a good-looking default. It's also the house style of somebody who's never been made to choose, and I'd been that somebody for about two years without really noticing.
There's nothing wrong with any single one of those decisions. The problem is that they aren't really decisions. They're what the tools hand you when you don't push back, and a portfolio that looks like the tool's defaults is quietly telling you the person didn't have an opinion strong enough to override them. Mine did. I just hadn't let it out.
Six years in print, and the site finally shows it
Before I came back to writing code I spent six years as a print and digital designer, properly, the full qualification and the years on the tools. Burnt umber, cadmium orange, a bone that's warm rather than white. Those aren't screen colours I picked to look retro. They're ink. They're the colours you end up with when your reference is a well-set page instead of a design system's starter palette, and they're the colours this whole site is quietly about, because the thing I keep coming back to, the baseline grid, is a print idea the web forgot about for thirty years.
So the palette isn't a mood board. It's the other half of me showing up in the work. For a long time the site looked like a developer who used to design. Now it looks like a designer who builds, which is the right way round, and the warm ground is the shortest way I've got to say that without a paragraph of about-me copy that nobody reads anyway.
Warm is also a decision about how it feels to arrive. A cool grey dashboard says here is some information, deal with it. A warm ground says sit down, this won't take long and it might be worth your time. I'd rather the second one. Most people who land here are working out in the first few seconds whether I'm worth a longer look, and I'd rather those seconds felt like being handed a coffee than like opening a spreadsheet.
Where it actually beats the old one, and where it doesn't
I want to be careful here, because it'd be easy to overclaim for the colour, and I've got a whole page on this site whose entire job is to stop me doing exactly that. The honest position is that the palette is downstream of the structure. Almost everything that was wrong with the old site was structural, and a warm brown painted over the old bones would still have shipped the phone layout to your laptop and thrown it away in front of you. Colour didn't fix that. Deleting a stylesheet and rebuilding the thing fixed that.
Where the palette earns its place is in three things. It has a personality you could pick out of a line-up, which the green-accent gradient look does not. It's coherent, four grounds and a single accent that lands exactly once on the whole home page, so the one orange surface actually means something by the time you reach it. And it's disciplined, which is the part people assume warm and retro can't be. Every colour pairing on the site is measured against the contrast it needs, and the build fails if one of them drops below the line. Warm isn't a licence to go loose. It's just a warmer set of numbers, held to the same standard a cold one would be.
Warm isn't a licence to go loose. It's a warmer set of numbers, held to the same standard a cold one would be.
Where it doesn't help is the part that matters most, and I'd rather say so than let the nice colour imply otherwise. The palette gets you to start reading. It can't make the argument for me. What you're reading about, once the warm ground has done its job at the door, is whether the accessibility is real and whether the claims are ones you can check yourself, and no amount of cadmium orange moves that by a single point. The colour is the invitation. It was never the case.
The part I'm in the middle of now
The work I'm doing this week has nothing to do with colour at all, and it's the harder problem by a distance. The site was built as one fluid layout, the kind that stretches and reflows to fit anything from a folded phone to a five-thousand-pixel monitor. That sounds like the responsible modern answer, and on the desktop it was fine. On a phone it was, in the exact words I used to the version of me who'd built it, absolutely horrific.
A fluid layout is a compromise with every screen and a proper home to none of them. What looked composed on a wide monitor turned up on a phone as the desktop composition squeezed down: enormous headings floating in the middle of the screen with a void of empty brown above them, and a navigation bar trying to hold a name, a now-playing line, eight section numbers and a toggle inside three hundred and seventy-five pixels, clipping every one of them. It wasn't broken in a way any test would catch. It was just bad, in the way only a person actually looking at it can tell you, which is the worst kind, because nothing flags it and the build stays green while it happens.
So I'm building three layouts instead of one. A phone gets something built for a thumb, with the navigation as a sheet you pull up rather than a bar you have to squint at. A tablet gets the wider canvas it actually has. The desktop keeps the thing that already worked. Each one is designed for the device in your hand, rather than one shape bent until it half-covers all of them.
Here's the honest part, and it's the bit I'd want somebody hiring to notice. The last time this site had three layouts, it scored fifty-five out of a hundred on a phone, and that was my fault. It chose the layout in the browser, which meant the server had to guess, and it guessed wrong for everybody, sending the phone build to your laptop and rebuilding the desktop one in front of you. I know precisely how this idea goes wrong, because I'm the person who once shipped it going wrong. So this time the phone is never shown the desktop layout, not even for a single frame, only the layout you actually need gets built, and it scores in the high nineties instead of the low fifties. Same idea, second time round, with the scar tissue from the first.
They turn out to be the same decision
I didn't plan the colour and the layouts as one thought, but they are one. A warm ground and a device-specific layout are the same instinct pointing at the same person. One of them says sit down. The other says I built this for the thing that's actually in your hand, rather than making you adapt to the screen I happened to design on. Both of them are about the person on the other side of the glass instead of the person who made it, and that, once I strip everything else away, is the whole of what design is. Or at least it's the part of it I'd want to be judged on.