Franco A. Alvarado

Colophon

History of this site

This website was first built in May 2012 as part of my coursework at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. It was originally built as a professional portfolio and CV site, fully hosted as a simple HTML page before I learned of the wonders of github pages.

The first Jekyll version of this site was built in the chaotic days of October 2016. The older bootstrap version of this site was archived in December 2016.

The portfolio and CV content was migrated to francopub.com in March 2020, and since then, this domain has hosted my author site.

The site has been deployed from netlify since October 2020.

This is the first iteration of my author site.

Design

Vollkorn is used for running text, and on the About and Home pages for display text because I guess I can’t make up my mind. About the typeface:

It intends to be a quiet, modest and high quality text face for bread and butter use. Unlike many text typefaces from the Renaissance period until now, it has dark and meaty serifs and a bouncing and healthy look.

Source

Raleway is used for headings, links, and other instances where serifs are too stuffy and you just want to let loose. About the typeface:

Raleway is an elegant sans-serif typeface, designed in a single thin weight. It is a display face that features both old style and lining numerals, standard and discretionary ligatures, a pretty complete set of diacritics, as well as a stylistic alternate inspired by more geometric sans-serif typefaces than [its]neo-grotesque inspired default character set.

Source

The CSS is compiled from SCSS. Legacy SCSS from the CV site still exists in the repo but is unused because I haven’t taken the time to unravel and sanitize that mess.

The following variables are used for my pretentious versions of black and white, charcoal and offwhite, and the gray is created by a Sass function combining the two because I can’t be bothered to make a new gray:

$charcoal: #2f3036;
$offwhite: #f8f8ff;

The current main color for the website is #AA5B39 and the link color is its complement, generated by a Sass function, because it’ll always look right! Except when the combinations are not accessible! Both are lightened by 50% for highlights and table cell shading, and the complement is darkened by 20% for link hovering.

Font Awesome 4.7.0 is used for various icons because updating is hard and I started this site so long ago. The quill icon is from Good Ware on flaticon.

Technical

An RSS feed is available for the blog. A site map is available as well.

Accessibility

Accessibility is an important part of my professional life as someone who works in educational publishing making accessible ebooks. It’s important to me that this site be accessible. Please contact me directly if there are any items I have overlooked. DM/publicly shame me in front of my colleagues on twitter using #eprdctn.

Subdomain Colophons

Both subdomains are using Vollkorn as the typeface for the body and Courier for the footer.

The design for both sites is shamelessly ripped forked from the work of Maxime Vaillaincourt. Refer to “Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll” for more information.

Wikis Site

I went with a more dramatic vibe in the color scheme and type choices.

The highlight is gold. The subheadings color is #750101. Links are in Maxime Vaillancourt’s original source default #efefff.

The gothy display typeface is Grenze Gotisch, described by the typefoundary (with some really fun word choice) as

a peculiar version of Grenze, now presenting Blackletter uppercase letters and little dramatic details in certain lowercase letters, which intensify its expressive burden

Source

The wikis subdomain was released with 0.1.2 on 2020 Oct 23. For more information on this wikis site, refer to the site’s about page.

Digital Garden Site

This is completely set in Vollkorn, aside from the update line, which is in Raleway. The site goes for an earthier color scheme to hint at the garden concept. For the background color, rather than the offwhite above, I went with a greener version of the offwhite, #f8fff9.

Title headings are reddish-brown, #7b514c. Subheadings are set in a friendly green #518263. The drop shadows on the boxes, black in the wikis site, are set to red #b5302b for fun. Link highlights are a redder version of the source default, #fff5f2.

The digital garden subdomain was released on 2020 Oct 24. For more information on the site and the concept, refer to the site’s about page.

Versioning

Current: 0.1.4

Last modified 2023 November 5