Colophon · How this was made
A note on the making.
uxward.com is a working journal of Brandon E. B. Ward: designed in light and dark, built with restraint, set in one grotesque, and revised occasionally. Most visitors will never see this page. If you're reading it, hello. You're the right kind of reader.
Colophon · Override engaged
A note on the breach.
You found the override. The same working journal, jacked into Night City: wet asphalt, fluorescent signage, and a handbrush face pulled off the shelf for the occasion. Type the code again, click the radiation symbol, or press Esc, to surface back into daylight.
Typography
One face, used without apology.
EverythingArchivoA grotesque by Omnibus Type. One face carries the whole site: display, body, labels, numerals alike. The site speaks in a single voice.Omnibus Type One face becomes three, after dark.
Override displayRock SaltA weathered handbrush face by Sideshow. It sleeps until a code wakes it, then tags the wordmark and the headlines like graffiti on wet concrete. Unreadable by the paragraph, which is the point: it only ever shouts.Sideshow Everything legibleOrbitronA geometric sci-fi face that carries the body text in Night City, the readable circuit-board voice under the graffiti. Archivo rests until you surface.The League of Moveable Type Nav & signageSixtyfourA raster homage to the Commodore 64's own typeface, built for CRT scanlines. Runs the header, footer, and mobile-menu labels, signage that reads like an old terminal.Jens Kutilek Color
Five tokens. One of them does the talking.
Canvas
The page. A soft off-white, deliberately never pure white.
#E7E7E7
Paper
A tinted surface for the few framed and inset moments.
#FAF8F4
Ink
The headlines, the wordmark, the body. Near-black, never pure black either.
#040404
Tertiary
The labels, the timestamps, the faint 10% rules. Quiet by design.
#646464
Signature red
Used with nerve: the section numbers, the contact field, every link's hover. One color that doesn't ask permission.
#CC0006
More tokens, and none of them rationed.
Canvas
Near-black with a bruise of violet. The wet asphalt the whole city reflects off of.
#07060F
Paper
The lifted panel, one notch off the void, where the callouts sit.
#0E0B1D
Ink
The text, haloed in cyan. White that refuses to sit still.
#F6F7FF
Neon pink
The signature, off its leash. Every sign in the city is lit; this one most of all.
#FF2BD6
Neon cyan
The glow under everything: reflections, selection, the hum off the wires.
#19F0FF
Neon blue
The deep end of the palette. Rain, distance, the light two blocks down.
#2B6BFF
Build
The stack, told briefly.
Night CityA second art direction, asleep until you type the word. Five words wake it; one of them is a 1993 cheat code.undocumented
FrameworkAstro: static-first, content-shaped, the right tool for a journal.astro.build HostingCloudflare. A minute to set up, seconds to connect to GitHub, minutes to deploy. Done.cloudflare.com ContentHTML. Essays and case studies hand-authored in plain, portable markup I'll still be able to read in 2046.html.spec.whatwg.org Domainuxward.com: registered 2020, used in earnest 2026.
SourcePublic on GitHub. The site itself is part of the work./uxward/uxward Decisions
Decided, and declined.
Chose to
Say nothing about availability. A site that announces it is looking reads like a site that needs to. The work makes the case or it doesn't, and the address at the bottom is enough.
Chose to
Wire the masthead to the repository. The four cells at the top of the home page report the last thing shipped, the last thing written, and the commit this build came from. None of it is typed by hand, so none of it can quietly go stale.
Chose to
Show twenty-nine of more than a hundred. The number I have shipped and the number worth showing are different numbers. Printing both is more honest than printing either one alone.
Chose not to
Put client logos anywhere. Borrowed recognition is not evidence of what I did, and a good deal of this work sits under NDA regardless. The outcome line is the credential.
Chose not to
Leave out the parts that went wrong. Every case study says what I would do differently: the over-architected build, the vendor I trusted too far, the relationship I let fend for itself, the data I should have reached for sooner. A portfolio with no mistakes in it has been edited.
Chose to
Give dark mode two reds. Red type on a dark page has to be lighter to stay legible; pale type on a red field needs that field to be darker. One value cannot do both, so the signature is two tokens after dark and one in daylight.
✦ Informed by
Borrowed, with thanks.
The systematic backbone of this site is borrowed from Wim Crouwel: the page as a visible grid, structure you can see rather than hide. The conviction to run on a single typeface comes from Experimental Jetset: one grotesque, used without apology. The discipline of black, white, and a single color that doesn't ask permission is Massimo Vignelli's, by way of the Unigrid.
And to the reader who got to the bottom of the colophon: thank you for looking. You are why the site is here. Here's something fun and beautiful, just for you.
Last revised Q2 2026 · Updated quarterly · Brandon E. B. Ward · Dallas❦