N° 024Planted 2026

Note · in bloom

Visual metaphors in this garden

I enjoy metaphors. This is a record of (most but not all of) the sources and decisions behind how the garden looks, gathered together in one note. You may also find much of this same information on the About these notes page and in the Tool shed.

The printed folio

  • Every page is a riso-printed sheet on a gridded table: two inks, Hunter Green and Sunflower, overprinting to olive, with Bright Red kept for stamps. The ink names come from the Riso ink list.
  • Ornament lives in small places (a drop cap, stage sprigs, the arched window, the snail in the footer), and the CSS stays plain underneath.
  • Rest of World's Digital Divinity series, and how they made it: the arched window, the table of contents with dotted leaders, the stacked page edges.
  • Knowing Machines: plain, brutalist labels.
  • Matthew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers: the margin rail and sidenotes.
  • Melina K's Brothertiger Fall Tour 2022 poster: the window, the hairline frame, the red ledger.
  • Michael Flarup's The Future is Colourful and Dimensional: depth that belongs on a screen, which he calls "Diamorph".
  • Stamp ink fades as a note goes untended. It's decoration only: the date is always there in words.

Growth, not dates

  • Notes are sorted by how grown they are: found, draft, in bloom, each with a two-ink sprig (seed, sprout, bloom). The stages approximately follow Maggie Appleton's growth stages. See Digital Gardens.
  • Each note keeps a permanent N° in planting order, set in the number-plate face GL-Nummernschild.

The ground the notes grow in

  • Questions plot: a note's Questions sit in a cross-section of soil, each question a seed, after Christopher Silas Neal's illustrations for Kate Messner's Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt. A rabbit sleeps in its burrow at the edge.
  • Plat map: Neighbors is a survey of lots, one per site, each with a survey call made from its owner's name, after Carlos Vanegas and colleagues' Procedural Generation of Parcels in Urban Modeling, found through jamessimo's Making my dream city builder.
  • Seed packets: the tags page is a bed of seed packets pushed onto stakes, and each tag's own page is the back of its packet.
  • Fingerpost: "Further in" is a fingerpost planted on a trail map, walking down the path as you page through the cards.

The tool shed

  • The idea came from Victoria: a place for the code made for the site. See Tool shed.
  • Made here hangs on a pegboard. Each piece of code hangs as the garden tool closest to what it does: the sync is a watering can, Slugify is secateurs, the plat map is a hand fork. A folded index card on the board, Why these tools?, gives each reason.
  • The pegboard is packed like the cards on the index, so tools hang at staggered heights, with every hook on a hole.
  • Borrowed tools are power tools still in the cases they were lent in, pastel cases with a luggage tag tied to the handle saying who lent them, standing on plank shelves on cut-wood brackets.

Dark mode

  • Dark mode is its own palette, not the light one inverted. The inks overprint by light instead of by ink (screen rather than multiply).
  • In the tool shed, the cases are the three inks at dusk, matched in lightness and outlined in a lifted tint of their own ink rather than cream. The tags are dark kraft, the twine and screws brass, the wood walnut, and shadows fall darker, not lighter.

Paths from here