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Reading Humans

Colophon

Sources, fonts, credits.

Sources

  • Benedict, Elsie Lincoln. Human Analysis, 1921. Project Gutenberg eBook 30601. The historical source for the five-type framework on this site. Read with caveats; see origins for the editorial treatment.
  • Sheldon, William H. The Varieties of Human Physique, 1940; The Varieties of Temperament, 1942. The most substantive twentieth-century attempt to put constitutional psychology on an empirical footing. Did not replicate well; the descriptive vocabulary survived.
  • Mayer, Emeran. The Mind-Gut Connection, 2011. Synthesis of contemporary gut-brain axis research.
  • Cryan, John F., et al. 'The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis', Physiological Reviews, 99(4), 2019. Current review of the field.
  • Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory, 2011. Autonomic findings underlying the configuration-preference observations on the biology page.
  • Plomin, Robert, et al. Behavioral Genetics, 7th edition, 2017. Standard reference for heritable temperament.
  • Power, Robert A., and Pluess, Michael. 'Heritability estimates of the Big Five personality traits based on common genetic variants', Translational Psychiatry, 5(7), 2015. Effect-size estimates cited on the biology page.

Fonts

  • Source Serif 4. Body and headings. Open source, Adobe-funded, designed for screen reading. Falls back to Charter, Cambria, Georgia.
  • JetBrains Mono. Metadata, code, percentages. Open source.
  • Sans-serif text uses the system stack (San Francisco on macOS and iOS, Segoe on Windows, Roboto on Android). Inter is deliberately not used.

Per-type palette

Each type carries a single accent colour, chosen anatomically where the body system has an obvious colour, and from the type's working register where it does not. Not random.

  • Digestive — terracotta #B45309. Baked clay, bread crust, the kitchen hearth. Matches the type whose register is the table.
  • Circulatory — vascular crimson #B91C1C. The body system is blood and the body marker is the florid face — the most direct anatomical mapping of the five.
  • Muscular — walnut #78350F. The colour of working materials: tool handle, leather, oiled wood. Matches "the Worker".
  • Skeletal — bone-shadow charcoal #44403C. Slate, stone, the colour of structure. Matches the type's permanence and reserve.
  • Cerebral — deep violet #6D28D9. The contemplative register — dusk thought, the inner life. Cerebral could read as ink-on-paper monochrome, but at site scale that loses the type to the body text; violet preserves the distinction without surrendering the editorial calm.

Technical

  • Built with Astro 5 and a small Preact island for the quiz. No UI component library. No icon library. No third-party JS on content pages.
  • Styled with Tailwind for utilities and a bespoke editorial CSS layer for the visual identity. No shadcn, no daisyUI, no Radix.
  • Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Source on GitHub (mirrored to GitLab). Deployment automatic on push to main.
  • Dark mode toggle persists per visitor in localStorage. System preference is the default.
  • No analytics. No cookies. The quiz state lives in your browser; result IDs are content hashes of the answer sequence.

Editorial principles

The site follows a specific anti-generic editorial register: Source Serif 4 body, system mono for metadata, drop caps on type-page openings, small caps for nav, first-line indents on long-form paragraphs, real italics for emphasis rather than bold, em-dashes used correctly, hand-set pull quotes, hanging marginalia on the biology page. The visual identity is hand-built; the protective principle is editorial confidence.

Acknowledgements

Reference comparators consulted during the design phase: themarginalian.org, aworkinglibrary.com, frankchimero.com, rauno.me. None of those sites' authors have any responsibility for what is written here.

Contact

Corrections, citations, substantive engagement: stefan.bicanic [at] gmail.com.