Deadline is set in Doves Type, designed by Robert Green (2013–2022) from sorts recovered out of the Thames. Since the MMXXVI resetting, the Headline cut finally does the work it was drawn for: titles are set at display sizes — up to 66px against a 20.5px Text body — a proper scale ladder in place of the single size this journal wore in its first years. Inline code and technical matter are set in Berkeley Mono Variable, unboxed: a change of voice, not a change of container.
Doves Type has no bold, no italic, and no small capitals; that austerity was Cobden-Sanderson’s whole argument. Emphasis is therefore letterspaced true capitals at a reduced size. Nothing is synthesized, nothing faked.
The page is constructed like a book page: an asymmetric grid, the text block held to roughly sixty-three characters a line, a margin rail at its left and a deliberate void at its right. The scholarly apparatus lives in the margin — the edition record, and on wide screens the footnotes, set as sidenotes beside their references. Editions are counted from Git commits: every revision of a text is a new setting, and says so.
The palette is two values and one pigment: paper (#F8F5F0), ink (#1C1814), and a red-lead vermilion (#C6431C) holding exactly five duties — initials, numerals, the edition line, links, and the cross in the device. By night the paper darkens to lamplight (#211C17, ink #EDE5D8) and the vermilion warms to #E0592A. The household fondness for all things orange survives in the vermilion’s temperature.
This site has 549
commits over 850 days, including 138 commits with content changes and 206 commits with theme changes — averaging 0.65 commits
per day.
Built using Hugo 0.154.2
with the Doves Deadline theme. The typefaces are served in WOFF2 and WOFF formats with font-display: swap, so the paper is never blank while the type arrives. Publication dates derive from Git commit timestamps and front matter, formatted in RFC 3339.
Deployment is managed through GitHub Actions, hosted on Ubuntu via Hetzner, with source maintained in the gold branch; new deployments queue behind in-progress builds, ensuring atomic updates. Standalone pages use the hideMeta parameter to suppress the edition apparatus.
Responsive breakpoints at 1180px (the margin rail folds and footnotes return to the text), 900px, and 480px. DNS and load balancing are managed by Cloudflare; SSL termination is handled at the edge by Cloudflare and at the origin by Let’s Encrypt via Certbot. Full content RSS feeds are generated for main content and all taxonomies. HTML is semantic, headers minimal, markup validated.
The device in the footer is a circle crossed in vermilion — the one artifact this page keeps. Salva nos stella maris.