About this desk

I am Bryan Calabro. I design and build a small portfolio of single-purpose tools, and one desk per discipline documents how each part of that work is done.

What this desk is for

Finals without process are a portfolio. Process without finals is a blog. This desk tries to show both, and it leans toward the middle of the work: the options that were on the table, the one that got taken, and the constraint that turned up halfway through and changed the answer.

How it is written

• First person, because someone made these decisions and it was me.
• Every entry is dated. A design decision without a date is a claim about the present that quietly becomes a claim about the past.
• The ugly middle goes in before the final. If a piece has no rejected option in it, I did not have a decision, I had a preference.
• No thumbnail walls. A grid of screenshots is a mood board; this is meant to be read.

What is in it and what is not

Every factual claim on this desk traces to a line in the fact ledger, which mirrors company/product-facts.md in the calabrodesign repo. Where a page would need something that ledger has not answered yet, the page says so, names the open line, and stops. It does not write around the hole.

That is why the toolchain flows page is nearly empty. It will fill in when there is something real to trace.

The ledger also records the failures, which is the part most design sites leave out:

The second one is still open. It was noted, not fixed, and writing it down here is the only mechanism I have that makes that uncomfortable.

The design of this desk

This desk sits outside the ten-family system that the apps use, and carries its own palette and type pair. Near-white and violet, Bricolage Grotesque over Inter. The work is meant to be the colour on the page; the page itself should not compete with it.

Both themes are held to 4.5:1 by the same check the apps run, which is the least I could do given what that check found.