Where Drafted began

Every site starts as a list of things you want it to be. Drafted started as a short one.

The Brief

I wanted a place to read that felt calm. The reading experience should be as clean as the best long-form blogs, with a little heavy outline and hard shadow on top, so the pages have a personality and do not disappear into white. One accent colour, an emerald green. A light theme and a dark theme. A wide layout that does not shrink into a narrow column on a big screen.

The home page should feel like a front page: one lead story, a few top stories and a plain list of the latest, in the style of a news site rather than a grid of cards.

And I wanted one idea that belonged only to this site, which became Imaxt: typography and layout doing the work that images usually do.

How It Should Be Built

I also had rules for the build, before I wrote any code:

• Static first. Posts are Markdown and MDX files, built into pages before anyone visits.
• Interactive only where needed. Small pieces of JavaScript for search, sign-in, bookmarks and messages, and nothing else.
• Posts at the root. A standalone post lives at /<slug>/. A series lives at /<series>/, and its posts at /<series>/<post>/.
• Cheap to run. Minimal use of any database, and hosting that costs almost nothing.

The First Version Was Made of Samples

The first version of the site was full of sample posts that I never intended to keep. They existed so I could see whether the design worked with real words in it: a lead story, a long article, a series page.

Those samples are gone. This series replaced them, and it exists because of that last line in the brief: write the decisions down.

The Road Ahead in This Series

The posts after this one follow the order I made things in.

Each post says what I chose, why, and what I gave up. A few of them also say what broke.

The brief was short on purpose. The details are where the decisions live.