Colophon
How this site was built
This site practices what its owner preaches: a written spec first, then a build held to it.
It is a static Astro site with no backend and no client-side framework. The only JavaScript of consequence is the home-page scene, and the route globe on the travels page that reuses its approach: one three.js canvas in which a single flanged pipeline descends through five stations — the problem, discovery and the decision, the build, trust, launch and learn — drawn as a cross-section and carrying a shader-driven pulse from problem to launch. Scroll position is anchored to the measured midpoints of the copy panels at runtime — never hard-coded — and an amber valve gate clamps the flow until the visitor scrolls through the trust station.
The pulse queues at the valve; the gauge reads AWAITING HUMAN; the visitor’s own scroll is the approval that opens it. That interaction is the thesis of the whole site, rendered as a mechanic.
If motion is reduced in your OS settings, the flow clock freezes and the camera snaps between stations. If WebGL is unavailable, a static SVG cross-section takes the scene’s place; on the travels page the route list stands in for the globe. The other subpages carry no scene JavaScript at all.
Type is Fraunces for display and Archivo for body and data, with tabular numerals on every counter. The palette is five colors: paper, ink, structure navy, a signal cyan reserved for the flowing data, and a gate amber reserved for human approvals.
The site lives at navaigator.me. The wordmark sets the two letters that matter in the signal colour; the compass mark in the header carries the same cyan pulse through the “A”.