Why I Built This Site Around Gravity, Not A Hero Video.

I have spent most of my working life thinking about attention — how to earn it, how to hold it, how quickly it leaves once it's bored. For a long time I believed the job was to be loud in the right way. A better video. A sharper hook. One more effect than the last site I built.

It took me years to notice that none of the things I actually remember ever asked for my attention at all. They simply had a center, and I moved toward it without deciding to.

That is the only idea this site is built on. Not an aesthetic, not a trend — a single observation, turned over long enough that it stopped being a design choice and became something closer to a belief. A thing does not have to reach for you if it knows where it stands. Everything nearby finds its way there on its own.

So there is no hero video here, no opening flourish that spends its best trick before you've decided to stay. The page simply begins, and what belongs on it arrives the way scattered things arrive when something finally starts pulling on them — not thrown into place, gathered into it. Scroll, and you are not moving down a page so much as moving through a kind of time. Rest the cursor near something long enough and it leans toward you, the way anything does when it has been waiting.

I did not arrive at gravity as a clever metaphor for branding. I had been circling the idea for years without a name for it, and gravity was simply the first word precise enough to hold it. A brand, I've come to think, is a center before it is anything else — before a logo, before a voice, before a single word of copy. Remove the center and all of that is just decoration with nowhere to stand.

Even the smallest choices point back to it, though I never meant for anyone to go looking. The accent colour in the code is not called lime. It is called source. The first thing you land on carries a label instead of a headline — Transmission 00, the source — and the page does not tell you it is loading. It tells you that you are entering orbit. None of this needed to be true. I made it true because I could not build the idea halfway and still call it the idea.

There is a version of this site that could have stayed dark no matter what you did, because dark is where the metaphor is easiest — deep space, distant light, everything visibly circling something bright. I built the other version anyway. Turn the page to its lighter self and the stars do not simply dim. They leave entirely, the way they do at the actual hour this describes, when night gives way and the sky stops being about distance and starts being about warmth. I wanted both hours available, because I have always thought of myself as both — the quiet pull that holds things in place, and the light that arrives once and changes what everything looks like.

Most of what I built along the way did not survive. Every effect had to answer one question before I let myself keep it: does this make the center stronger, or does it just look impressive standing next to it. Almost nothing passes that test. I would rather a page do one true thing than ten decorative ones.

If any of this worked, you will not remember a single effect by the time you leave. You will remember, without quite knowing why, that something here had a center — and that whatever you were doing, you drifted a little closer to it than you meant to.

I did not choose that idea. I only finally noticed it had been mine the entire time.