Colophon

A colophon traditionally records how a book was made: its type, paper, printer and binding.

Mentalblock has rather less paper, but the principle seems worth preserving.

The site

Mentalblock is built with Astro and served through Cloudflare.

The site is deliberately simple. Pages are generated largely as static HTML, with little JavaScript sent to the browser and no advertising or behavioural tracking.

Cloudflare Web Analytics provides limited, aggregated information about readership and performance without the use of analytics cookies. More detail can be found on the Privacy page.

The type

The principal typeface is Crimson Pro, chosen for its literary character and its ease over longer passages.

Source Serif 4 provides support where needed, while IBM Plex Mono is used for the smaller mechanical details of the site: labels, metadata and fragments that belong more to the machinery than the manuscript.

The fonts are hosted by Mentalblock rather than loaded from a third-party service.

The marks

The Mentalblock figure and its glowing green fractures grew from an avatar used long before this site existed.

The logo, wordmark and their various arrangements were developed for the site, but retain that original figure: something solid, damaged perhaps, yet illuminated through the cracks.

The illustrations

The illustrations are intended to feel sketched rather than rendered: impressions accompanying the writing, rather than images attempting to explain it.

Some have been produced with the assistance of generative tools and then selected, directed or refined to suit the piece they accompany.

The words

The thoughts, experiences and opinions published here are my own.

Artificial intelligence is sometimes used as an editorial companion: to question an argument, suggest a structure, identify an awkward sentence or help turn an unfinished conversation with myself into a finished piece.

It does not have the experiences being described, and it does not decide what I believe. The final words, and responsibility for them, remain mine.

The source

The source code for the site is maintained in GitHub and deployed automatically through Cloudflare.

The machinery will undoubtedly change over time. This page will attempt to keep up.

Last updated: 13 July 2026