A colophon is the note at the back of a book that says how it was made – the typeface, the paper, the press. This is that, for my website.

A colophon is the little note at the back of a book that says how it was made – typeface, paper, which press ran it. This is that for my website, because apparently I’m the kind of person who does that now.

This site has been live for 1 month, 19 days6 September 2026Still standing, still no Squarespace..

Two sites in one

This site has two registers. Composed is the default – the version I’d hand someone I’ve just met. Candid is the same person with fewer filters. Flip between them with the ⇄ arrow in the nav; it works like a dark-mode toggle, except what changes is tone. The colour follows the tone: composed holds back, keeping it to small cobalt marks on warm-white paper; candid floods the page. The site remembers which you prefer.

Two sites in one

There are two versions of this site, and you’ve found the unfiltered one. Composed is me with my professional voice on; candid is me after the second coffee. Same idea as a dark-mode toggle, except I’ve used it to dial how much Gabi you get – composed in near-monochrome, candid in full colour. And yes, it remembers which mode you prefer.

Words and code

I write the words; Claude writes the code. With how work actually gets done nowadays, hand-cranking every line to prove a point seems foolish.

Built with

Astro, a static-site framework that ships plain HTML and very little JavaScript – fast to load, cheap to run. I worked through Astro’s full tutorial first, enough to make the structural calls myself and hand-edit where needed. The JavaScript runs the composed/candid switch and remembers your pick, keeps a couple of dates from going stale, and powers the small bits of nonsense I hid around the place for my own sanity. There’s no Squarespace, no drag-and-drop, no 400 npm packages I don’t understand. I’ve kept it small and with minimal dependencies on purpose, because future-me has to maintain this and future-me is lazy#sorrynotsorry.

Type

Three faces, all self-hosted so nothing has to call out to a font service: Syne for the loud wordmark, Hanken Grotesk for everything you’re actually reading, and Hack for the little monospaced labels. Each is subset and served from my own domain, with a system-font stack holding the place until they load.

Where it lives

Domain registered with Porkbun, served from Cloudflare. Traffic is measured with Umami, routed through my own domain so your browser never calls a third-party tracker directly. No cookies, no creepy cross-site nonsense – what I see is that a page got read, not who read it. That’s all I want.C’mon.I work in observability.You can’t expect me to have nothing.

Made by glitch

Designed, written, directed, and maintained by me, Gabriele Hasson-Birkenmayer, under the name made by glitch. An industrial designer who moved into product management and taught herself the tech – which is a polite way of saying I had no business building this and did it anyway.