Colophon

By the numbers

381 entries published since 2011, spanning 599 tags. The most active year was 2015, with 64 entries. The five most common topics: Photography (74), Covid (34), Berlin (33), Travel (27), Generative AI (23).

History

I’ve maintained this website, in various iterations, since 2002 (most of the very old posts are private). There’s some magic in “showing up” and sticking with something for the long run—and this is probably the longest I’ve stuck with anything.

Type

This website is set in Signal by Production Type and Basis Grotesque by the Colophon Foundry. I find them to be perfect typographic workhorses: legible at all sizes, sufficiently characteristic to leave an impression, but neutral enough to get out of the way.

Images

I try to use publicly available images wherever possible, and original art in an editorial context, always crediting the artist. I consider this fair use when discussing the works—but if you’re the copyright owner and would like me to take down an image, please get in touch at hello@larsmensel.com.

Technical

This website runs on Jekyll, which is an engine for turning files and folders into a website. I agree with the founder of Blot when he says: “I like the simplicity and durability of plain text files.”

Tracking

This page doesn’t collect any user data. It uses Plausible Analytics for lightweight, anonymized visitor statistics.

Style

Here are some style preferences, which I’m mostly recording for myself.

• Headlines use APA capitalization style.
• Subheadlines use sentence case.
• Publications/Books/Band Names are printed in italics.
• Quotes
  • Short quotes are set in quotation marks.
  • Long quotes (several sentences) are set as block quotes. The name of the quote author follows at the end, preceded with a —.
• Typography: Butterick’s Practical Typography lays down the basic rules for writing on the web and is the go-to reference.
  • Straight and curly quotes
  • Hyphens and dashes
• Images: Always credit the artist.
  • Always precede all attribution with the title of the photo in quotation marks “Rock concert, New Mexico, 1975”
  • Creative Commons: Best practices for attribution
  • If a photo is straight from the artist, use “Used with permission.” following the credit.
• Numbers: One-Nine in words, then switch to numerals: 10, 11, 55, 200.
• Decimal separators: In English: “EUR 999.50” or “EUR 2.5 million”
• Chemical elements are CO₂ and H₂O, respectively.