Mercure

Mercure looks bloody lovely. Not entirely sure what it is that I like about it, besides it’s obvious elegance and quietness. I adore the capital, Trojan-esque characters and the shhhh-ness of the text when in long, bookish columns.

I had never heard of the type foundry Abyme before, nor had I seen their Tumblr-like website with random images and typeset chunks that float all over the place. This reminds me that at this point in the life of the web, any website that doesn’t start with a single sentence at the top of the page feels cool to me. Like, when I have to really stare at a website to understand what it wants me to do, how it wants me to read it—that’s just so thrilling.

That cool-mystery-website feeling is extremely rare. And I was reminded this the other day when I stumbled upon Ftrain’s Ways of Reading. I was shocked that a website could restructure and retrofit multiple tables of contents to suit multiple ways of reading — but of course you can!

It’s a reminder for me that there’s not just one way to make a website. And it takes a degree of stubbornness that I admire to find something entirely new.