Colophon

The premise

The light on this site is real. It comes from one lamp; night here is night at my desk in Seattle; the lamp turns on because it’s dark, not because you flipped a setting. Every addition either obeys that physics or it doesn’t ship. The reasons behind each change live in the log.

The lamp

An anglepoise, drawn by hand in SVG — arm, tension rods, three joints, a pear-shaped bulb seated up inside the shade. It is the theme switch, but it doesn’t behave like a switch: it flickers before it settles, its head aims where you drag it, its chain pulls, and its bulb can burn out. It sits on the H because that’s where the light needed to be.

Type

Space Grotesk for the wordmark and headings. Newsreader, an optical-size serif, for reading. Space Mono for the small print — labels, dates, and lines like the one ticking in the footer.

How it’s built

Hand-written HTML, CSS, and a little vanilla JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no bundler, no analytics, no cookies. What View Source shows you is the actual site, the way I wrote it — the repository is public. The footer of the front page names the exact commit you’re looking at.

The name

champ, n.m. — French: field. As in champ de vision, field of view; profondeur de champ, depth of field; champ lumineux, light field. My full first name, Champ-Pacifique, translates to “peaceful field.” The lamp and I were always going to get along.