νοῦς · The Eye the mind that sees
A good theme is almost nothing. It is a room with the right light in it, a chair that you forget you are sitting in.
Nous is built for the long read — the essay begun in the morning, the footnote chased before lunch, the quiet half-hour with an old book you keep returning to. It is a system for Obsidian, for Typora, and for the small websites where people still write in paragraphs.
Its colors come from a single afternoon: the limestone of a half-ruined temple; the small blue of the sea through the columns; the olive that grows indifferent to history. Its type is drawn from the printed book. Its mark is a circle and a circle — the eye, reading.
Chapter II
Eight colors, all from the same hillside — the limestone at noon, the sea through the colonnade, the pot at the market, the olive that refuses to hurry.
Paper
λίθος · limestone
Marble
μάρμαρον
Ink
μέλαν · ink
Aegean
θάλασσα · sea
Terracotta
κεραμική
Olive
ἐλαία
Ochre
ὠχρός · saffron
Wine-dark
οἶνοψ πόντος
Hairline
γραμμή · line
Chapter III
Aa Gg Αα Νν Rr
Four faces, one continuous argument. Cormorant speaks; Garamond reasons; Didot recites old Greek; JetBrains Mono handles the machinery, and knows its place.
The just,
the beautiful.
Cormorant Garamond
Light (300) and Regular (400). Tighter letterspacing at scale, real italics, small-caps variant for folios.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Who writes
a sentence, thinks.
EB Garamond
Regular (400) with old-style figures, discretionary ligatures, and italic for emphasis. Set at 18/29 on a measure of 64ch.
We read what we've been. 1,741 footnotes; §§ 3—12.
Ἐν ἀρχῇ
ἦν ὁ λόγος.
GFS Didot
A 19th-century Greek revival. Polytonic, upright, for inline Greek and epigraphs. No Latin needed.
γνῶθι σεαυτόν · know thyself
const λόγος
= () => 42;
JetBrains Mono
Regular (400) and Medium (500). One size smaller than body, to signal a register change without shouting.
if (ψυχή) return { λόγος, πάθος };
Πίναξ · Contents
Nous is built for the long read — the essay begun in the morning, the footnote chased before lunch, the quiet half-hour with an old book you keep returning to.1 It is a theme for Obsidian, for Typora, and for the small websites where people still write in paragraphs. It is not a theme for dashboards or for screens that need to shout.
The name comes from the Greek. To the ancients, νοῦς was the faculty of the mind that simply sees — the part that recognizes a truth before it has finished proving it. That is the kind of attention this theme is made for. Not the scroll, but the pause.
What you will find here is a system of small decisions, all in the same direction: toward the reader, and away from the interface.
Nous · The Philosophy · Chapter I
Its colors come from a single afternoon: the limestone of a half-ruined temple, warmed by the sun; the small blue of the sea through the columns; the olive that grows indifferent to history on the hillside. Nothing saturated, nothing that wants to be looked at before the words are.