Colophon

This colophon describes how the site you are reading is made — its typography, its design principles and the components we use to make our journalism clear and answerable.

Typography

Type is the core of the design. We set our headlines and body text in Source Serif 4, a serif chosen for sustained, comfortable reading of long explanatory pieces. Interface elements and metadata — labels, navigation, dates, source lines — are set in Inter, a clean sans-serif that keeps the furniture of the page distinct from the journalism itself.

Design principles

The look is deliberately serious and restrained, so that nothing competes with the words. Our principles are:

• Serious editorial design — sober, uncluttered layouts that put reading first;
• Typography-led — hierarchy and clarity come from type, not decoration;
• Dual light and dark themes — a comfortable reading experience in either mode;
• Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA — colour contrast, structure, keyboard navigation and semantics built to meet the standard;
• Fast and server-rendered — pages are rendered on the server and kept light, so they load quickly and work reliably.

Components for clear, answerable journalism

Our articles use a small set of structured components designed to make the substance easy to find and easy to check:

• Quick Answer — a concise, direct answer to the central question at the top of a piece;
• Key Points — the essential takeaways in brief;
• Sources block — the primary sources behind the piece, gathered and linked in one place;
• What we don’t know — an honest statement of the limits of what we can currently establish.

These components reflect the same commitment as the rest of the publication: explain the thing clearly, and show the reader where the evidence comes from.