Colophon

Philosophy

Technologies evolve. These principles have proved more durable.

Build rather than buy — where it matters. We build the things that define the experience and buy the things that don't. We'd rather spend our engineering time solving our clients' problems than rebuilding commodity infrastructure.

Open standards over lock-in. Web platform first, frameworks second. HTML that means something, CSS that cascades, URLs that last. The further a decision is from a standard, the more suspicious we are of it.

Performance first. Speed isn't a feature, it's a form of respect. Every dependency, image, and script on this site had to argue for its bytes.

Accessibility isn't optional. A site that only works for some visitors is a site that partly works.

Privacy by design. The same principle that shapes the platform shapes the website: collect less, encrypt what matters, and prefer architecture over promises. The Privacy Statement and Security pages cover this properly.

Small, understandable systems. We'd rather fully understand a modest stack than partially understand an impressive one. Every component below can be explained by the people who chose it — this page is the proof.

Design

The site and platform are built on a single design system: design tokens for colour, spacing, and type; components shared across the marketing site and the client dashboard; and one set of rules applied everywhere so that nothing has to be designed twice — or inconsistently once.

The visual language is deliberately quiet. Dark by default, typographically confident, one accent colour used sparingly. No gradients, no stock photography, no illustration for illustration's sake. When something moves on this site, it moves for a reason — the landing page's background, for example, is a small WebGL shader (based on React Bits' Silk) that we ported and tuned ourselves rather than reaching for a stock particle library, and it paints a single still frame if your system asks for reduced motion.

Design work happens in Figma, with more specialised tools where a piece calls for them, and AI-assisted tooling in exploration — which has its own section below.

Frontend

The frontend is written in TypeScript, end to end.

The client dashboard is built with Svelte — chosen because it compiles away rather than shipping a framework to every visitor, which suits a platform where responsiveness is felt in every interaction. The journal and marketing pages are built with Astro, which renders to plain HTML and ships JavaScript only where a page genuinely needs it.

Most pages on this site are, in the end, just documents — and they're delivered as documents.

Styling is hand-rolled CSS on our design tokens — no utility framework, just custom properties, a fluid type scale, and stylesheets small enough to read. Motion prefers CSS over animation libraries; it's used for orientation, not decoration, and everything respects prefers-reduced-motion.

Backend

The API is built with Hono, a small, fast web framework that runs at the edge. Data lives in PostgreSQL, managed by Neon, accessed through Drizzle — typed queries, no magic. Files are stored in R2, Cloudflare's object storage, as ciphertext.

The theme throughout: boring, typed, and small. The most interesting thing about our backend is the encryption architecture it serves — and that's documented on the Security page, not here.

Infrastructure

Everything runs on Cloudflare — Workers for compute, Pages for the site, and the network itself for delivery. We favour edge computing for a simple reason: our clients are everywhere, and latency is a tax on every interaction. Rendering close to the visitor is one of the simplest performance wins available, so we take it.

Source control runs through GitHub, and the site deploys straight from it — every deploy is a commit, builds are reproducible, and rollback is a revert. Backups are automated and encrypted. The operational details — and the honest limits — are on the Security page.

Open source

We build on the work of countless open-source projects, and we're grateful to the people who maintain them. Where practical, we contribute fixes, documentation, and tools back to the community. When we release our own work publicly, you'll find it on GitHub under licences chosen to match the project.

Security

Covered properly on the Security page, so only the shape of it here: sensitive client content is encrypted in the browser before it reaches our infrastructure; everything travels over TLS; passwords are stretched on your device and stored only as salted hashes; secrets live in managed stores, never in source control. The website itself ships the unglamorous protections that actually matter — sensible security headers and sessions locked to the browser.

Security decisions on this site follow the same rule as design decisions: the boring, well-understood option beats the clever one.

Performance

Performance work here is mostly the discipline of not adding things. Beyond that:

• Pages render at the edge and arrive as HTML rather than asking the browser to assemble the document afterwards.
• Images are served through an image CDN in modern formats, sized for the viewport that asked for them.
• Fonts are self-hosted, subset to what the site uses, and loaded with swap so text renders immediately.
• JavaScript is split per route and shipped only where a page is genuinely interactive.
• Everything is compressed and cached at the CDN — most visitors are served from a data centre near them, not from an origin far away.

The test we hold ourselves to isn't a benchmark score; it's whether the site feels instant on an ordinary phone on an ordinary connection.

AI

AI is part of how we work, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest — so here's the actual position.

AI accelerates our work: exploration, iteration, tooling, and the mechanical parts of building software. It doesn't replace judgement, and it doesn't sign the work. Every deliverable that reaches a client has been reviewed, understood, and stood behind by a human at Plus±. If something we ship is wrong, the responsibility is ours — "the model did it" is not an excuse we recognise.

On confidentiality: client material is never passed to AI tools without appropriate safeguards, consistent with the commitments in our Privacy Statement and Terms of Service. Internal tooling combines commercial and self-hosted models, chosen per task with data-handling as a first-class criterion.

We think the honest framing is this: AI changes how fast good work happens, not what good work is.

The name

The studio is named after two of the simplest symbols in typography: plus and minus. They represent iteration, refinement, trade-offs, and balance — the daily work of design and engineering.

It's a reminder that good products are rarely created in a straight line. They emerge through small additions, careful subtraction, and continuous refinement.

Typography

Every designer has a favourite section of a colophon. This is ours.

Text is set in Geist, with Geist Mono for code, meta lines, and tabular data — both self-hosted, both licensed under the SIL Open Font License. The sizing philosophy is restraint: a small scale of deliberate sizes rather than a ramp of nearly-identical ones, body text at a comfortable measure, and generous line-height because cramped text reads as cramped thinking.

Numbers in the dashboard are set tabular, so columns of figures align the way columns of figures should. Punctuation is treated as design: proper quotation marks, spaced em dashes, and real + and − glyphs — this studio is named after two characters of typography, so we try to earn them.

Photography and illustration

Mostly, there isn't any — and that's a decision, not an absence. The site's visual interest comes from typography, structure, and the glyph system rather than imagery.

Where imagery does appear: it's original work, properly licensed assets, or — occasionally, and always disclosed in context — AI-assisted imagery that a human directed and finished. We don't use stock photography of people pointing at whiteboards, and we credit third-party work where attribution is due.

Browser support

We target the modern web: the current and previous major versions of the browsers below, on desktop and mobile.

Older browsers receive a functional experience, even if some visual enhancements are unavailable — content first, enhancement second. If something on this site fails in a supported browser, that's a bug; tell us and we'll fix it.

Accessibility

Accessibility here is mostly the result of building with the grain of the web rather than against it:

• Semantic HTML first — headings that outline, landmarks that orient, buttons that are buttons.
• Full keyboard navigation, with focus states that are visible by design, not left as browser defaults to be styled away.
• Colour contrast that meets WCAG AA targets, checked against our actual palette — including the accent colour, which is used for emphasis but never as the only carrier of meaning.
• prefers-reduced-motion respected everywhere something moves, including the landing page's shader.
• ARIA where it adds information, and nowhere it would repeat what semantic HTML already says.

We won't claim perfection here either. If you hit a barrier on this site, we genuinely want to know — it will be treated as a bug, because it is one.

Sustainability

No grand claims — just the practical observation that efficient engineering and responsible engineering are mostly the same work:

• Smaller pages use less bandwidth, on our side and yours.
• Efficient code means less compute per visit; serverless means no idle servers drawing power for nobody.
• Optimised images and fonts are the biggest bandwidth win on most sites, so we took it.
• Edge delivery moves data shorter distances.

The site is fast because it's frugal. The environmental benefit is real but modest, and we'd rather understate it than greenwash it.

Related

If you'd like to go deeper into any of the topics above:

• Privacy Statement — What information we collect, why, and what we do with it.
• Security — How Plus± protects your data, including our encryption architecture.
• Cookie Declaration — Every cookie we use, what it does, and how long it lasts.
• Terms of Service — The legal agreement covering your use of the service.

A colophon is never finished. The stack evolves, and this page evolves with it. If something here interests you — or you notice something we've missed — we'd genuinely like to hear from you.