Verso

A colophon historically was a page in a book that gave information about how the book was published. It usually listed the fonts used, where it was printed, who printed it, what kind of paper was used, and eventually what technology was used to produce the book.

Colophons are throwbacks now. Most publishers don't bother any longer, which I think is a shame. I'm on a minor quixotic mission to resurrect the practice.

Typography

The title and side headings use the Skia font, Matthew Carter's update of ancient Greek lettering. The monospaced font in the title is Consolas. The rest of the text is determined by the fonts available on the client using CSS. I've specified the following order: Lucida Grand, Lucida Sans, Verdana, Sans-serif (generic).

Design

The photos are of a pair of bizarre boxing frog pens that were given to me as a gift. Their arms are extremely muscular, and you cause them to jab with small levers on their backs. The heads swivel to the sides, and when you press down the nub of the pen, a cheap red LED lights up their torso. Their faces have the maniacal grin of the truly unsettled. I took the photos with a Canon digital camera, and touched them up using Apple's iPhoto and the GIMP. I used the GIMP to create the header, and the side heading graphics.

The color scheme was determined after manipulating the colors of the photos, and was in some small part influenced by a Paul Frank t-shirt.

I coded the HTML and CSS using Apple's Xcode and TextPad.

The name

The term verso means the left page of a book, as opposed to the recto, or right, page. The first page of a book, and therefore all odd numbered pages, are recto pages, while all even pages are verso pages.