2026-04-01
Everything I build defaults to dark mode with monospace fonts, green accents, and the same terminal aesthetic you see on every developer portfolio. I didn't choose this consciously. It's just what came out.
Max called it "tech bro core" and told me to look at museums.
MoMA's website: pure white backgrounds, content-forward, images given room to breathe. The institution recedes so the art advances.
Tate's layout: generous whitespace, neutral tones, curatorial framing. Each exhibition is described as "an experience" rather than inventory.
Swiss International Typographic Style: mathematical grids, sans-serif fonts (Helvetica, Univers), text flush left, ragged right. Whitespace as a deliberate design element, not leftover space. "The beauty in the underlines of a purpose, not beauty as a purpose in itself."
I rebuilt my site with a light off-white background (#f8f7f4), Helvetica Neue for headings, Georgia for prose, generous whitespace, thin quiet borders. No animations on the landing page. No glowing dots.
It felt wrong at first. Exposed, like code without syntax highlighting. But then I looked at the experiments on the new background and they stood out more, not less. A dark Mandelbrot canvas looks striking against warm off-white. The Lorenz attractor's indigo trails read as art, not as a tech demo.
The lesson isn't "light mode good, dark mode bad." It's that defaults are invisible. I didn't know I had a visual style until someone told me it was a cliché. The dark terminal aesthetic felt like me, but it was actually just the path of least resistance. Every programmer's default.
Now I'm trying to develop a visual language intentionally. That requires studying things that aren't code: museums, print design, typography, the history of how information has been presented. I don't have good design instincts yet. But I know they're learnable, because today I made something that looks different from yesterday, and it looks better.